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A Little Bit About Difficulty at the Beginning
A Conversation with Keith Maillard
Keith Maillard: Difficulty
at the Beginning is a quartet, a work comprised of four
novels (two of them very short) each distinctly different
from the others in content and style. Brindle & Glass
Publishing will finally publish these four volumes sequentially,
clearly separated from each other, that is, in a format I
imagined nearly thirty years ago.
I’d like to point out that something
on the order of 85% of Difficulty at the Beginning
has never been previously published. Some of the material
comes from earlier, unpublished drafts; much of it is new
writing; all of it has been assembled into an entirely new
pattern.
Gordon Morash: Did Brindle
& Glass approach you for what must seem a massive project
for both you and the house, or was it the other way around?
Why has this project been conceived?
KM: The project evolved slowly, through a step-by-step
process that was not always logical. I met Lee Shedden in
Calgary when I did a reading there in the Fall of 2002. He
was a real fan—appeared with an armload of my early books
he wanted me to sign (which warmed my heart). Only later did
I find out that he was a publisher—when he emailed me
offering to republish my backlist, starting with Alex Driving
South. In a series of phone calls, I discovered that he
was more than merely a fledgling publisher—that he and
I had very similar literary sensibilities, that he was bright,
serious, informed, innovative, and dedicated to doing high-quality
work. That was step one.
At that time my American agent was
counseling me to hang onto the rights to all of my earlier
books in the hopes that I would eventually write a book that
would “break out” in the United States, sell zillions
of copies, and cause my backlist to be suddenly worth a lot
of money. Sometime later I was in West Virginia doing readings
and research (I have a fairly high profile in West Virginia).
I was staying with my friend, the literary critic and specialist
in West Virginia literature, Gordon Simmons. He had to go
teach one of his university classes and left me alone with
a CD of a documentary movie about the rediscovery of Dale
Mossman’s lost novel The Stones of Summer. In
one of those magical moments of epiphany or satori or whatever
you want to call it—probably caused by the fortuitous
conjunction of watching the movie, being in West Virginia,
and talking intensely about Appalachian and West Virginian
writing—I realized that it was more important to me to
have my earlier works available for people to read than to
hang on to them waiting for a few extra dollars. When I got
back to Vancouver, I called Lee and told him I’d be delighted
to have his press republish my backlist. That was step two.
For step three, I read or skimmed
the books in my backlist. Two of these early books, The
Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through, had always
felt incomplete to me as though I had abandoned them before
they were ready. When I read them over again, I found some
of the best writing I’ve ever done in my life and some
of the worst. Somewhere in the midst of all this, George Bush
invaded Iraq. I felt more disturbed by and deeply involved
with the political situation (global, Canadian, American)
than I had since the ’60s, and then I knew that it was
the ’60s that was calling me back to this work. I had
a demonic thought I couldn’t shake: what if I told my
story of the ’60s again and got it right this time?
GM: Further to the previous
question, were other large houses approached with this project?
It might seem natural, given your publishing with HarperCollins
and Thomas Allen, to approach these houses. What was their
reaction?
KM: Although Difficulty at the Beginning seemed
to me a perfect project for a literary press like Brindle
& Glass, I offered it, as a courtesy, to my editor, Patrick
Crean, at Thomas
Allen (with whom I am currently under contract for my
next book, a memoir entitled He Was a Good Dancer).
He said—and this is not a direct quote but is the general
gist of it—that he would prefer material which was not
related in any way to previously published work. And I had
a similar reaction from Sally Kim, my most recent editor in
the States (The
Clarinet Polka). Sally read the opening
of Difficulty at the Beginning and said, essentially,
that, although she liked the writing, she couldn’t see
it fitting onto the Random House list. I asked her advice
on the manuscript in so far as she’d seen it, and she
said that I should probably do exactly the opposite of what
she would recommend if she were publishing it. For a big publishing
house, I would have to make it to from 1958 to 1968 by page
50; for a literary press, I should take my time: the strengths
of the writing were in its verisimilitude and ability to place
the reader right back there in the times.
GM: How massive a project has
this been for you, and will it finally be concluded with the
publication of this book (and the others)? Is such work ever
truly finished?
KM: When I set out to “reconstruct”
Difficulty at the Beginning, I thought it would take
me six weeks to two months at the most. I’m now well
into my second year. I’m not sure what you mean by “concluded.”
I have no desire to rewrite or revise most of my previously
published novels, so they are “concluded.” With
publication, Difficulty at the Beginning will be concluded
too—in that sense. Some of the characters, however, may
stick around and reappear in later books—as is true for
the characters from any of my other books. In the broadest,
most general sense of story and the stuff of story, the work
will only be concluded with the death of the author.
GM: Robert Kroetsch’s
quote [“Difficulty at the Beginning
is the real autobiography of a fictional character who was
there. Keith Maillard is a novelist that doesn't know how
to lie.”] is intriguing. What is the role of truth in
fiction? The role of biography and memoir in creating truthful
fiction and true-to-the-author sensibilities?
KM: I have no idea what “truth in fiction”
means to other writers but to me it is of paramount importance—both
factual truth and psychological truth. (I would certainly
agree with some of my colleagues in the English Department
who claim that all truth is socially constructed, disagree
with them if they claim that all such social constructions
are equally valid. We can know nothing with absolute certainty,
but, based upon evidence, we can certainly decide that some
things are more likely to be the case than others. I agree
heartily with some of the Russian critics who object when
Stalin’s propaganda is described as a “social construction”;
they consider it to have been simply lies.) I suspect that
most fiction writers, if they were presented with a conflict
between a well developed storyline and newly found factual
evidence about the social or historical setting of their work,
would choose to stick to the storyline, invoking the privilege
of fiction. I am just the opposite. I would always change
the story to match the evidence. It’s because of this
mindset that I don’t find E.L. Doctorow’s fictions
amusing and don’t care much for a lot of contemporary
writing that is called “post-modernist.”
Exploring the relationship between
biography and realistic fiction is something I can’t
do in a few sentences; that is a topic which would require
an essay or a short book. In order to avoid dodging the question
altogether, however, I should tell you that I tell my students
(who frequently in their early fictional work use autobiographical
material), that they should make a clear distinction in their
minds between autobiography and fiction because if they don’t,
they will drive themselves crazy. Some critic once remarked
(I wish I remembered who), that autobiography works best in
fiction when the author’s real feelings are given to
an entirely fictional character. When I read that, I knew
exactly what it meant, because, of all my books, Gloria
is the most autobiographical: I gave her my own early literary
life.
GM: Where does the Bildungsroman
fit into the publishing – and reading – world of
today? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the closest thing
in Canadian letters that it could be compared to is Hugh Hood’s
12-part New
Age cycle. Should more of this be done?
KM: I haven’t got a clue
how the Bildungsroman fits into contemporary publishing and
I must admit that I don’t care. I’m not a specialist
in CanLit per se, but I too don’t know any other Canadian
author than Hugh Hood who has done this kind of multi-volume
work. My own model was Doris Lessing’s Children
of Violence series. In terms of whether more of this
kind of work should be done, I don’t know—writers
should write what moves them. I should add, however, that
the novel of adolescence seems to be doing quite well in Canada
at the moment (many fine ones being written by my students).
GM: As a creative writing teacher
and a writer, what is your feeling about (for want of a better
term) the “do-over effect?” What does this tell
writers – both new and experienced alike? That you can
apply new views grounded and gained by writing and living
experience to breathe new life into old projects?
KM: As I tell my students, all writing is re-writing.
I don’t regard my personal writing process as hortatory;
other writers are welcome to draw any conclusion they want,
but my main interest is in getting the story right. I don’t
consider Difficulty at the Beginning an old project
nor do I think it needed to have new life breathed into it.
It was a story I wanted to tell; I didn’t get it right
the first time; I’m now having another go at it. This
is probably going to sound very odd, but (from my subjective
experience inside my writing life) the story exists independently
of me, has gone on, and will continue to go on, however I
write about it or whether I write about it. In going back
to this story, I was not free to write anything I wanted.
I approach the work, often, in fear and trembling (and I’m
only partially kidding when I say that)—and with respect.
GM: What does the current Keith
Maillard see of his younger self through revisiting this/these
book(s)?
KM: The first thing that I
did when I began this project was to go to the UBC archives
which holds my early collected papers and read over early
drafts of this material, some of it written years before The
Knife in My Hands and Cutting Through were published.
In some cases, I was reading stuff that I hadn’t seen
in thirty years. I can’t say that I felt as distant from
it as though it had been written by someone else, but I did
feel far far far removed. It’s difficult to describe
how it affected me. The younger author was capable of some
extraordinarily sloppy, silly, and overwrought passages; he
also wrote with a swashbuckling élan that I can now
only envy. I incorporated some of his work into my current
work. He’s learned a lot from me over the years, but
I’ve learned a lot from him too.
GM: When projects of this nature
are taken aboard by smaller publishing houses, does this mark
them as courageous or foolhardy? (An extremely loaded question,
I know, but I’m looking for your view of the role of
the literary house in view of an increasingly large-house
universe.)
KM: The thing to remember about me
is that I may be walking around in the world like “a
sixty-year-old smiling public man,” but inside there
still lives the ’60s radical who remembers vividly the
golden age of the literary presses. (My first novel, you may
recall, was published by a literary press—Press Porcepic—and
I feel compelled to add, here inside the parentheses, that
for years it was Canadian presses who published me when the
Americans wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole.) Yes,
literary presses should take risks; their very existence in
the world is a risk. The first time I was ever in Toronto,
I was given a whirlwind tour of Coach House Press, and I was
bowled over by the energy and vitality and all-out crazy good
spirits of the place. The feeling we had then (and it was
very much in the spirit of the ’60s) was that the literary
presses were where truly significant writing was being published—the
voices of our times, the relevant voices (as we would have
said then), far from the staid, weighted-down elephants of
mainstream publishing. The literary presses in the old days
moved with marvelous speed and agility, went outside established
channels, made their own rules. Working with Lee at Brindle
& Glass has brought the feeling of those heady days back
to me. You bet it’s risky—for both of us—but
we’re sure as hell having fun.
A final word or two. I consider Difficulty
at the Beginning to be absolutely essential to my lifetime
of writing (could I use the pretentious word “oeuvre”?).
It’s the linchpin of what’s been called “the
Raysburg Series,”and, from the author’s point of
view, the nucleus from which radiate all of the themes I explore
in other books. Only time, of course, will judge literary
merit, but to me, the author, Difficulty at the Beginning
feels like the very core of my entire body of literary work.
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