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A Conversation with Keith Maillard
LS: It seems to me that a lot of the
reviewers of The
Clarinet Polka were approaching it from the wrong
angle; they just didn't get it. For instance, Greg Hollingshead's
review in the Globe and Mail.
KM: I like Greg's work, particularly The
Roaring Girl—I was on the jury that gave
him the Governor General's Award for Fiction that year, so
I obviously like the book a lot, and his earlier short stories
I like a lot. So having said that, let me say that The
Clarinet Polka was not written for Greg. I think he did
his best, but it was not a book written for him. And that
came through fairly clearly in the review.
LS: Who was it written for?
KM: Some of the other reviewers it
was written for. I've had three starred rave reviews in the
States—Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publisher's
Weekly. A number of people have seemed to get it and liked
it.
But I've replied to you inside the metaphor I set up with
Greg Hollingshead. If you're just asking who I wrote it for,
I was really hoping that some guy at the Sylvania plant or
on the line in Detroit—I imagine this guy getting the
book as a present from his girlfriend or his wife and saying,
"Honey, you know I never read anything," and she
says, "C'mon, give this one a try," and he sits
down and he reads it and he says, "Hey, you know, that's
a pretty good book—and it's true, too [laughter]."
That's one of my imaginary readers.
But I also wanted to write it in such a way
that almost anybody willing to come to it with an open heart
would like it, you know, whether you're working in the Sylvania
plant or not. I wanted to write it in such a way that it was
accessible.
LS: It's very linear—there's not
a lot of the flashing back and forth that happens in, say,
Gloria.
KM: The whole construction of the book is
different.
Gloria is modelled on the early- to mid-1950s Big
Literary
Novels.
It isn't modelled on any one of them because there
were very different styles in the '50s, but a lot of things
they had in common. People in those days liked big books—if
you went and plunked down your $3.98 you wanted a big fat
book that'd take you a while to read. They did extended flashbacks
the way they happen in Gloria. They were often very
writerly, and used a kind of omniscience that really could
go anywhere and do anything and look at anything, which I
had fun with—and made fun of a couple of times—in
Gloria.
LS: What were the models for The Clarinet Polka?
KM: There's a long tradition of first-person
narratives in American writing, going all the way back to
Huckleberry
Finn, one of those great seminal books. A number of
people have said, "were you thinking of Holden Caulfield?"
and no, I wasn't. Of course I read The
Catcher in the Rye, along with 4 million other people,
and it's in there in my head, but … Seeing as all these
books are attempting in some sense to pick up on or echo a
contemporary style, The Clarinet Polka was suggested
by books that began to appear in the '70s—first-person
narratives or fairly simple narratives with a centre on a
single character. Bobbie
Ann Mason, for example, someone who I like a lot and have
read a lot of. So it's a totally different strategy.
In my mind my work divides into the first
five books, which is up to Motet,
and then there was a period in which I had writer's block—when
I came back to writing I finished Motet, but it belongs
to the earlier work—and then all the books coming after
that, the style they're written in is a conscious decision
to write in that particular style, to imitate a certain kind
of novel, starting with Light in the Company of Women,
which masquerades as a novel written in about 1914.
It never occurred to anybody to say to me
"Keith, why don't you write your own books?" [laughter]
I don't know what to say to that except that they are
all my own books.
I made them take out of the UBC
Creative Writing prospectus about how we help the students
"find their authentic voices." My authentic voice
is whoever I'm writing about. I try to get the voice as authentic
as I can—is it Jimmy Koprowski, is it Gloria, is it Susie,
is it whoever. And to me, that's what the craft of fiction
is. You have to turn the story over to your characters. The
only time when I'm saying "I" and it's really me,
so far as you can get there, is in the poetry that opens Dementia
Americana. That "I" is as me as I can get
it, at least in the first sequence. Some of the poems in the
second sequence I'm just having fun.
LS: The Clarinet Polka ends very powerfully;
did you have the ending in mind when you began writing it?
KM: All the books in the second unit of books I've had the
entire structure of the book before I started. This drives
my students crazy; they don't like to hear that.
LS: Of course not. They're young and lazy.
KM: How can you write a scene if you don't
know where it's going? Of course, you do, and a lot of the
early books, I didn't know where they were going, I just sat
down and wrote them, right? Two
Strand River I didn't know from one day to the next
what those damn characters were going to do. And if you start
to take Two Strand River apart in terms of structure
you'll see that I didn't know. It's very … loosely
and rather … shabbily held together.
But you write like you write in your thirties and you write
like you write in your fifties, I mean, it's the way it is.
LS: The Clarinet Polka is being
brought out in the States by Thomas
Dunne Books. I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be
a huge hit, in part because it is so simple, in a way …
KM: What I was trying to do is use relatively simple language—I
mean, I never use language that wouldn't be available to my
protagonist—often to express very subtle things. It is
my conviction that everybody in the world has subtle thoughts.
Not just university professors have subtle thoughts, everybody
does, right?
LS: Jimmy's a working guy, and a drunk,
and to get him to sit down and tell this story in his own
language, that must be a tricky game to play. Did you find
yourself lapsing into dumbspeak or flying off into language
that was too sophisticated?
KM: Of course! [laughter] That's why you revise.
It took me a while to get Jimmy's voice down. But once I got
it, it seemed infinitely natural to me. It flowed fairly easily,
but of course, you write, and you go back the next day and
say "Oh, shit, what was I thinking, he wouldn't say it
that way," or whatever.
LS: Is there anything else that you were
trying to achieve with The Clarinet Polka, or is there anything
else that's you'd like to say about it that you haven't had
a chance to say?
KM: Well, I did say it on Bravo! Television,
but it bears saying again. A whole bunch of things came together
for me that caused me to write the book. The thing about the
books I write is that they grab ahold of me.
I had writer's block for nearly two years, didn't write anything—signing
my name on a cheque was the most I could do. And one of the
realizations I had when I came back to writing again was that
it is absolutely pointless—in a really deep, profound
way, it is absolutely pointless—to write anything
except what you want to. I'm not trying to be, you know, James
Clavell or James Mitchener or somebody like that. I found
myself at UBC, I had a good job, it paid well, I really liked
it, and I felt very happy with my life, and I said 'I am only
going to write what I want to, and if nobody likes it that's
too bad [laughter].'
OK, so what came together to push me in the
direction of The Clarinet Polka; the first thing that
happened was that two friends of mine died within six months
of each other, for very similar reasons, and it made me really
sad and thoughtful. I went back to a short story I had written
when I thought I was writing a collection of short stories.
The collection of short stories contained what turned into
Hazard Zones, what turned into Gloria—I
can't imagine how I thought Gloria was a short
story—and the short story that turned into this novel,
which originally was called "Drinking and Fucking."
I went back to that story and I read it again and I said,
'It's not a bad story … except it doesn't go far enough,
it doesn't say what I would want to now, and by God, that
guy's not really Polish.' Then I thought 'Well, gee, what
is it to be really Polish?' And so I thought 'OK. I want to
be able to write this and say "I" and when I say
"I" I want to be Polish.' How long is that going
to take me and how do I do that?
LS: How did you do it?
KM: A lot of the guys that I was really close to back in Wheeling
when I was growing up were Polish. One of them was one of
the guys who died and who the book is dedicated to.
One angle is that I read every single thing I could—right
at the point that I was starting the book I think read, if
not every book, then close to every book that has ever been
written on the Poles in America (many more than I listed at
the back, you know, because it's really pretentious if you
sit down and list every damn thing that you read. You would
get this bibliography that would just go on for page after
page after page and people would just think you were an asshole
[laughter]). I only listed the important ones, but I read
book after book after book.
I went back to Wheeling twice, my old friend
Larry Dolecki came over and met me and gave me this tour of
South Wheeling, the Polish area, and filled in a lot of the
gaps for me. We went into the old PAP, which is the model
for the PAC in the book, and we walked around and talked,
and I began asking him questions like "Who were the polka
bands when I went with Frank back in 1958 to the Paczki Ball?"
and he says, "Gee, I don't know [laughter]. But you can
probably find out." Well, eventually I did find out,
and I found out a whole bunch of things.
That first trip I went to Wheeling I had
my daughter with me, she was 11 at the time, she was a great
travelling companion. We went into St. Alfonsus Church where
a lot of the things were taken when St. Ladislaus's was closed
down by the Bishop of Wheeling—a very stupid, unfeeling
and heartless move, I think, leaving the old generation Poles
stranded without a church—and back in the back was an
image of Our Lady of Czestochowa that had been at St. Lad's.
I went in there with my kid, and I said, 'Go pray or something,
Elizabeth, or walk around and look at things and let me alone
for a minute. She did, and I knelt before Our Lady, and I
prayed with all my heart, and this is what I prayed: "Please
help me to get it right." [general hilarity]
LS: Well, I think you got it right. I
didn't grow up Polish either, but …
KM: I sent the Canadian edition to Larry
Dolecki as soon as I had a copy and I sat here with bated
breath. He eventually called me and said, "Well, you
got it right." [huge sigh of relief]
But he pointed out a tiny little defect. He said, "You
only got one thing wrong in the whole book and it isn't about
Polacks, it's about Catholics. There's no Mass on Good Friday."
And I knew that perfectly well and I don't know how that snuck
in. So in the American edition the reference to Mass on Good
Friday is gone.
Then I did a huge amount of research on World
War II Poland, a very sad and depressing topic, and when the
book came out here, much to my surprise, some of the people
that it really appealed to was an audience I had never thought
of ever, and that was the Solidarnosc Poles, the third-wave
Poles who came around 1980. This fellow, who I met and who
became a friend of mine who I thank in the acknowledgements,
was reading the book in manuscript—I hoped he could offer
me some suggestions and he did—and he got to the point
in Chapter 14 in which the kids are saying to Dad, 'What were
you doing when the war started, can you remember, what was
it like, tell us the details!" and he walked over and
picked up the phone and called me, and he was really moved
and kind of teary, and he said "That's exactly
what we did, with my Dad back in Poland, that's what we wanted
to know, and the kind of details he told us are exactly like
what you have in your book. Where on Earth did you learn this
stuff?"
And I said, "That's easy. Out of books. That's how I
learned that stuff [laughter]."
LS: The Clarinet Polka got good notices
and was reviewed all over the place, but whenever I recommend
it—even to booksellers—it's "Who? Never heard
of him." Canada seems to have a block about you.
KM: You know, I'm beginning to wonder about
that. There's a small core of loyal Maillard fans that have
been around practically since Alex Driving South, and
they're absolutely dependable—always there—they
buy a small quantity of books very quickly, but they never
seem to grow.
LS: It baffles me, because there are so
many writers in Canada—ranging from the very talented
to, well, hacks—who are lauded and fawned over and people
come to their readings and people recommend them to each other
… And you're in the top tier, talent-wise, but you're
not on the radar. The only thing I can think of is that they
don't think you're Canadian.
KM: I've set two books in Canada—and they're both pretty
good, actually—and I probably will again. But right now
I'm doing this "let's explore Raysburg West Virginia
from every conceivable angle," which I think I'm coming
to the end of.
LS: Does it bother you?
KM: It does a bit. Not as much as it bothers
my wife, who's a born-and-bred Canadian girl. I mean, some
part of me says, "Why should somebody living in
Brandon, Manitoba be particularly interested in what goes
on in some strange little town in West Virginia? But on the
other hand, people seem to be interested in what goes on in
India, or in the Barbados, and the other thing that I think
could appeal to Canadians if they made a little bit
of a mind-jump is that West Virginia is a rather interesting
part of the United States. It's not your mainstream apple
pie centre of the country like Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Indiana.
Nor is it New York City or Los Angeles. West Virginia is one
of those forgotten backwaters that was kicked around and exploited
by rich people from other places. And for parts of Canada
where people have been exploited and kicked around by rich
people from other places, there might be a chance to identify.
LS: Do you see yourself as fitting more
into the American or the Canadian literary tradition?
KM: It depends on what book I'm writing.
The Raysburg books I tend to think of as much more in the
American tradition than the Canadian. Two Strand River
I tried to make as Canadian as I could get it—in fact,
I think I probably went overboard. Motet is Canadian/British
before it's American, although there's a strong American voice
in it, but the literary devices and the way it's built always
struck me as more Anglo-Canadian than it was American. But
the Raysburg books have their own logic and if you want to
stick them in a tradition it's probably the American tradition.
Canada has always seemed to me to have the best possible relationship
to these two giant towers of literature. Canadians can either
look south of the border or they can look across the ocean.
And there have been really strong American influences in Canada
and really strong British influences in Canada, as well as
a really strong interesting indigenous Canadian tradition
in fiction. In some sense, Canada is almost an ideal place
to write. You can get away with things in the British style
that would never fly in New York.
Canadian publishers published me when the
Americans wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole. All those
middle books—everything from Alex Driving South
up until Gloria—were rejected in the United States.
They all eventually came out in the States, but being made
available for sale is not the same as being published.
The thing about Americans is that they're
afraid of ideas in fiction. If you want ideas in there you've
got to slip them in sideways. Whereas the Brits are not afraid
of ideas, and in fact will stop the story interminably to
explore them, and Canadian fiction tends to allow that kind
of expansiveness, too, in a way that wouldn't survive south
of the border. How's that for a bunch of generalizations?
I don't know if that's true or not, but there's some
truth to it.
If it wasn't for Ed Carson, who published those middle books,
I might not have been published. I mean, some of them are
very odd books when you think about them, and people in New
York did not want to take a chance. I mean, they were not
odd in the big, dramatic ways that Americans like; they were
odd in small ways.
LS: They don't seem markedly strange to
me—Maybe I've read too much Canadian stuff and have been
inured to it or something—but The Knife in My Hands
and Hazard Zones, in particular, don't seem too far
out of the main stream of American literary fiction at the
time that they were published.
KM: True, but they were too quiet. Americans want to sell
lots of copies.
My students always ask me, "How did you get published?"
and I tell them, but it's not any use to them. Things have
changed a lot. You don't get published the way I got published.
LS: How did you get published?
KM: Two Strand River just went over
the transom to Press Porcepic, and they had hired a student
over the summer to read the slush pile. (See, a publisher
now wouldn't even have a slush pile because they wouldn't
take things over the transom, but in those days they did.)
And he hit my manuscript and just began following David Godfrey
around saying "You've gotta publish this. You've gotta
publish this. You've gotta publish this." And eventually
to shut him up they did.
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