NOVELIST, SHORT STORY WRITER AND PLAYWRIGHT, LEON ROOKE HAS LONG BEEN one of the most prolific, important, and surprising writers in Canada. Winner of the 1983 Governor General's Award (for Shakespeare's Dog) and the Canada-Australia Prize, his dazzling third novel, A Good Baby, was greeted as a brilliant tour de force by critics and readers alike. The annual Eden Mills Writer's Festival, now in its seventh year, is another of Rooke's progeny-this year's planning committee includes Rooke, as well as the novelists Janice Kulyk Keefer and Thomas King. This fall, The Porcupine's Quill introduces yet another side of the protean Rooke: his new book comes with a 45rpm single. On the disc, Rooke, in a voice rich with the cadences of his native North Carolina, reads "Muffins" before a Toronto audience. Nancy Wigston spoke with Leon Rooke at his home in Eden Mills, Ontario.
BiC: Lets talk about the "Muffins" recording first. What attracts you to public readings?
Rooke: I see the act of reading aloud as a very different thing from reading the printed page. Most writers --when they are reading-seem to be attempting to recapture the experience the reader has when reading. In my view that's impossible. So I ask myself why make that attempt? I look for something closer to theatre, essentially a dramatic monologue. I also revise the text.
BiC: The voice in "Muffins" that says -- "this is what had been going on in the family" --is unlike the authorial voice, this is a storyteller saying: "I'm catching you up to date."
Rooke: That's right. That story has a kind of circular structure. Four or five times in the structure of the story there's a different plateau that's established, and the circle then begins from another vantage point.
BiC: Like a spiral going down deeper and deeper into the characters. Also what's noticeable is the audience laughter--which struck me because the subject matter is very painful --the teenage daughter's pain, her incipient bulimia --these are serious subjects. Are you expecting the audience to laugh where it does?
Rooke: You never know how the audience is going to respond. But I'm always quite struck when I'm reading by that point in the rendering when the material has taken an unexpected turn, and I think with this particular piece, the way it starts, the delivery, the tone that the thing has-you think essentially it's a comic piece. The audience realizes-by degrees-that the material is heavier than they thought it was going to be. At that point the laughter becomes a more nervous, more uncomfortable laughter, or the comic is wedded with a definite shift that goes on in the consciousness of the audience. I'm always intrigued by that --I have a number of pieces that I'm inclined to read aloud simply because they invite the listener to engage in that changing process.
BiC: Writing about his recent book tour, Martin Amis said it surprised him when he'd read the line "poets don't drive" in the States and it got a laugh-but he liked it. Do you have similar experiences?
Rooke: Anyone who's done any theatre work has the same experience, one never knows what time the audience is going to respond. Often the the funny lines-the truly legitimately funny lines-are buried, say in a long sentence, a phrase. Depending on the speed with which one delivers the stuff the really funnier stuff gets lost.
BiC: Once you asked, rhetorically, "when is a story truly finished?" Are you seeking fluidity with these readings? Are you trying to break free of print?
Rooke: No, I wouldn't say that. It's just a very different form. Last week I was at the fundraising gala for the Factory Theatre. I had a five minute slot-- so I took a story that would normally take twenty minutes to read and I scaled it down to five minutes. It was probably better as a five minute piece. "Muffins" in fact is a throwaway from the novel I'm working on at the moment. At the time I couldn't find a place to fit it into the novel so I turned it into a short story.
BiC: Are these peripheral characters from this novel?
Rooke: It's the mother who's the central character in the novel. The girl isn't even born until the last fifty pages.
BiC: The husband/father here is disgusting, callous, with butter dripping down his chin-both mother and daughter turn on him. Why this tremendous sympathy with women?
Rooke: I find myself thinking how curious it is in the social fabric of our times. Despite the heavy concentration of males in business life, political life, despite the fact that they run or mismanage countries-- when you remove those rules from the picture what you see is the male as a shadow figure-the shadow may loom large over a household, but often is not the central and most powerful figure. Because these are the worlds that my fiction mostly deals with, it does not surprise me that it's the females that occupy centre stage.
BiC: The girl in "Muffins" is prickly, independent, innocent, vulnerable she seems one of a lineage in your fiction-the sister in A Good Baby, the little girl in "The Only Daughter", the girl in "The Woman From Red Deer Who Went To Johannesburg..." A lot of them have been hurt physically or emotionally. Do you come from a prickly, independent line of women?
Rooke: I grew up surrounded by women in a house with the absence of a father figure. But dramatically I'm drawn to that kind of material too, just the idea of the resilient, resourceful, independently-minded female, coping with the damaged psychic carrying, that heavy baggage of wounds, but still excelling, frequently triumphant. I hadn't realized until you mentioned it the frequency of these wounded deer.
BiC: But you don't let them die.
Rooke: I'm drawn to those figures who have some kind of inner strength despite the tun-nod or the pain or the hideous world which they've inherited. It's a bit like that famous line from Andrew Marvell: "the wanton troupers riding by that shot my faun and it will die." Many of these little girls are the faun, but they are not going to die, they stand up to the travail.
BIC: What about the question of identity? Some of your books, like A Good Baby, take place in North Carolina, whereas "Muffins" could take place in Eden Mills or Toronto or anywhere-your real country is the human psyche. How do you see this movement that pegs writers as being from a place, writing about a place?
Rooke: It is easier on the writer if the writer can be located. It's certainly easier for critics if they can locate a writer. Look what they do with Alice Munro. Yet she can certainly get outside that when she chooses to. And readers like that too, coming back to those authors where they know what the terrain will be, and insofar as there are surprises what the surprises will be. They have a far more difficult time with writers such as myself whom they cannot anticipate that way. I'm aware that being of that description likely has reduced the number of readers I've got.
BiC: Do you think so?
Rooke: I'm assuming so. But that might not be the only explanation. [laughter]
BiC: I'm surprised that A Good Baby wasn't nominated for the Governor General's Award, whereas Shakespeare's Dog, a real out-of-left-field book, inventive, wild, literally a romp, won.
Rooke: But not everybody's cup of tea.
BiC: Well obviously some people's. But Baby didn't win you anything?
Rooke: That's right. A Good Baby is a far more substantial book, a far more important book, a far better book in my view. I don't make any apologies for Shakespeare's Dog, but it has a limited scope. I certainly thought [Baby] might have been shortlisted. I remember Mordecai Richler's book was overlooked that year. I think it was a curious jury. It seemed clear from Sharon Butala's letter in the Globe that she and her fellow judges were not looking at what was the best novel published that year, but looking to give the award to someone whose reputation had not been as enhanced as they thought it might be. I don't know what it was.
BiC: Could it be part of your refusal to categorize, to say "I'm a man who writes about Shakespeare's dog"?
Rooke: Right. I dug that channel but so what, I won't continue to work that one. It was a great idea. [laughter]
BiC: It was, brilliant. One of your stories appeared in Bonnie Burnard's new collection-Stag Line, Stories by Men. Were you asked to write a story specifically for a male anthology?
Rooke: I received an invitation to send a story to that anthology and I think I was told it was to be an anthology solely of male writers. I submitted a story that happened to be available at the time.
BiC: There seemed to me a kind of slyness in your story ("The Boy From Moogradi and the Woman with the Map to Kolooltopec"). We have this wretched scene in the rain, the mountains, this boy shivering, at the mercy of the adults around him, and at the end the tough guys-the Central American guerillas- follow the American woman who has the map to the place that probably doesn't exist, but ought to. Is that symbolism deliberate?
Rooke: Oh very much so. She is the one of the three outsiders who is carrying the map. So I guess that must mean that I do believe that it is the female who carries the map. I wouldn't argue too much against that, frankly. But with that story I was interested in what had happened in so many of those Latin American countries an the story is really in response to the Reagan policy with the contras in Nicaragua, and what happens when civil disorder takes place in a country. I want to believe and do believe that people generally want to be left alone, that they want the guns to be removed, or they want a sanctuary. So that's a story about a search for a sanctuary. The image of the entire peasant population of the country holding to that same image of the paradise that may or may not exist. Whether it does or does not the need for relief against all the hardship continues to exist. Despite the treatment of the little boy by the leader of the rebel forces I was definitely on his side because he was the non contra side, the non-Reagan side.
BiC: You've been mentioned in the same breath as writers like Russell Banks and Cormac McCarthy, but you seem more ebullient than either. Banks' Affliction, for instance, was a very powerful, very dark book, as was McCarthy's The Outer Dark.
Rooke: Yes, speaking of dark books, but a fabulous book.
BiC: That baby (in The Outer Dark) dies horribly, whereas the infant in A Good Baby redeems everyone she comes into contact with -McCarthy's baby is the antithesis of yours.
Rooke: Yes, he's burnt alive.
BiC: Are you happy to be in that group of male writers?
Rooke: I don't know that I see that I am. It's certainly wonderful company. Russell is a terrific writer, Cormac McCarthy is fabulous and has been since his first novel. The Orchard Keeper is a beautiful, very life-affirming book, it certainly has some darkness in it, I can't think of a Cormac McCarthy book that does not, but it's beautiful, life-enhancing. Very strange the distance traveled between that novel and The Outer Dark. [These writers] are nice company but I don't really know that that kind of ordering has much significance to me. All I think of are the dozens and dozens of writers whose work I really admire.
BiC: Who are you reading now?
Rooke: The last really good novel I read was the one Roger Greenwald in Toronto has translated, Mr. Silberstein, by Max Von Sydow, the star in all those Bergman movies. A fabulous, fabulous novel. [Russell Banks'] Rule of the Bone I started the day it arrived-it was a page-turner. I'm reading Keath Fraser's new novel, Steve Heighton's new story collection. I've always read impulsively, and I take a special pleasure in discovering writers I haven't read before. I just finished Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits-after hearing the tape of the The Lives of Eva Luna.
BiC: You've gone from McClelland & Stewart to The Porcupine's Quill. Why? Rooke: McClelland & Stewart would not have the faintest interest in doing such a book as this little "Muffins" book. And my prevailing sense is that they have scant interest in my work overall, with the exception of Ellen Seligman. So I suppose the answer really is that simple. I suspect I'm considered very off the wall, very eccentric, very offbeat, not nearly mainstream enough, too quacky, too grotesque, too weird, too unconventional, not exciting enough-who knows?
BiC: But all those things are exciting --it takes a special kind of mind to conjure up the characters you invent- Shakespeare's dog, for instance, or the characters in A Good Baby. "Muffins" perhaps, might be considered quintessentially Canadian--
Rooke: You'd almost have to say that ["Muffins"] has to be mainstream, but the approach to that material is not a mainstream approach. From my perspective, writers Eke Russ [Banks] and Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, marvellous, wonderful extraordinarily gifted writers whose audience is certainly much larger than my own, are nearer to the mainstream than most people say they are but they certainly don't have the size of the audience. The nearer you come to being identified as a literary writer, the less you're identified as being in the mainstream. From M&S's perpective I would certainly not be in the mainstream. And maybe that's my legitimate place. Years ago Russ Banks said o me, "Maybe we should expect to have only a thousand readers."
I have to confess --a few months ago reread that odd book by Denis Donoghue of conversations with Nelson Algren. I first read it 30 years ago, I was struck by a statement Algren makes in that book. Denis Donoghue keeps asking Algren --time and time again: "When are you going to write the big book, everybody is waiting for your big book?" This is after The Man with The Golden Arm and all that. Algren finally answers and says, "Funny you should say that, but I have a very strong sense that no one is looking for my big book. Nobody cares a fandango whether I write a big book or not. There is no interest in this big book. Why are you talking about the big book?" I feel that way too. I don't mean just the big book, I mean any book. [laughter]
BiC: Is this going to be the final book?
Rooke: I'm still writing the books, whether they want them or not, so in that sense the structure of the universe has not altered from the time I first started writing.
BiC: Critics call your fiction: "wondrous strange," or "strange, eccentric, and beautiful," or even "like a knife in the stomach, hard to ignore"
Rooke: Yeah, that's really appealing isn't it--
BiC: Earlier you mentioned Isabel Allende's magical stories. The girl in "Muffins" with her lizard necklace-she's a creature from fable, isn't she, "fabulous" like so many of your characters?
Rooke: I believe there's something in the human spirit that hungers for that kind of presence in one's fife. And our own experiences from day to day contain that element to a degree that would astonish us. And it's very useful, we need that kind of magic, we need to believe in the spiritual element, because without it how do you live with the atrocities, people all over the globe doing hideous things to each other. It's the sense of revitalization one feels every spring --I mean the difference between these trees now and a month ago-it was just stark, ugly, and bare. And now it's opulent, verdancy totally embracing all over the place. I equate that magical presence of the extraordinary with what happens in nature. Just the other day I was standing in this room, and I thought, when I turn around I'm going to see a fish in that river --I knew it-and I did and there was a big pike --about this long --swimming tight out on the water. Had I thought longer about it, I might have thought, what is it going to mean? [laughter] It's that connection that happens with amazing, amazing frequency.
BiC: The conjunction of the magical and the quotidian.
Rooke: Yes. And it seems to me that it happens a great deal more often to those people who invite it-who issue the invitation that life does hold those riches if one will only welcome them.
BiC: And that's what your fiction is about?:
Rooke: Yes.
