| Summary: | Oral History Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe, 1997 Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 1951- Oral history interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe, 1997 1 sound cassette (ca. 53 minutes) Collection number: Tape 214 Abstract Biography Transcript OVERVIEW Access: The collection is open under the rules and regulations of the Institute. Provenance: Donated by Tom Isern and Guy Vanderhaeghe (Acc. 2499). Property rights: The Institute for Regional Studies owns the property rights to this collection. Copyrights: Copyrights to this collection is held by the Institute. Citation: Guy Vanderhaeghe, Oral History Interview, 1997, Institute for Regional Studies, NDSU, Fargo. ABSTRACT The following interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe took place at the KDSU studio at North Dakota State University, Fargo, N.D. on January 23, 1997. The interview was conducted by Dr. Tom Isern, a professor of history at NDSU. The interview concerns Guy Vanderhaeghe’s lecture at NDSU, his literary achievements, and his writing. BIOGRAPHY Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 2 of 12 Guy Vanderhaeghe was born on April 5, 1951 in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Canada to Clarence and Alma Vanderhaeghe. He received degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and began developing a passion for history. Guy studied history until his career as a fiction writer began. He is the author of several books and even a few plays. Guy is the recipient of two Governor General’s Awards for his books Man Descending in 1982 and The Englishman’s Boy in 1996. TRANSCRIPT Introduction: This transcript is from the interview that occurred between Guy Vanderhaeghe and Tom Isern prior to a lecture Vanderhaeghe gave at NDSU. A transcript was donated along with the cassette containing the interview. It is not known who developed the original transcript, but it was nonetheless scanned and formatted. Credit was given to Roger Grimm for recording the interview. Very little editing, other than formatting has been done to this transcript version by the Institute staff. Beginning of Transcript: Tom Isern: I'm Tom Isern, Professor of History at NDSU, and I'm looking forward to this because I have with me Guy Vanderhaeghe: from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who is the recipient of the Governor General's Award--the highest literary award offered in Canada--for fiction in the past year. Guy is visiting Fargo to lecture at North Dakota State University under the auspices of the NDSU Institute for Regional Studies. I'll give you a little dust jacket-type information. Born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. Now a resident of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, one of my favorite prairie cities. The author of six books and two plays. I'll talk about the books here in order. Man Descending, in 1982, was a book of short stories. That won a Governor General's Award then, too. Another collection of short stories, The Trouble with Heroes, in 1983. Still another book of stories, Things as They Are, in 1992. Guy's first novel, My Present Age, in 1984. Followed by another, Homesick, in 1989. And now the current work, the one most recently in print, is The Englishman's Boy, 1996, from McClelland and Stewart, that won Guy his second Governor General's Award. What an accomplishment! I understand there will be an American publication of The Englishman's Boy, am I right? Guy Vanderhaeghe: That's right. Picador USA will be doing it. Likely the publication date will be September or October of this year, 1997. Isern: We'll look for that. Your books are hard to get in the states; I know they are available at the Varsity Mart here on campus; but not very commonly available, and I'm sure that one will have a very good reception. Welcome to NDSU. Vanderhaeghe: I am very pleased to be here. Isern: This book, The Englishman's Boy, is a great read. Tell us what you are doing with this book. Give the American readers an introduction to it. Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 3 of 12 Vanderhaeghe: I am trying to intertwine two stories. The first story is the Cypress Hills Massacre, which occurred in 1873 in southern Saskatchewan. It's a kind of mythic event, at least in Canadian western history. I think it would be fair to say that scarcely any American would have ever heard about it. It involved a group of plainsmen, of wolfers, roughly about half of whom were Canadian and half American, who had horses stolen by Indians outside of Fort Benton in Montana. They attempted to track these Indians and recover their horses; crossed the Milk River, which was then sort of thought to be the border between Canada and the United States; lost the trail of the horses; spent a Sunday drinking at a whiskey trading post. In the Cypress Hills another horse was stolen from the whites, and a fight broke out between a camp of Assiniboine Indians and the wolfers. Nobody seems to know exactly how many Indians were killed. Some of the earliest accounts said as many as 300 hundred, and the Canadian government, which tried to extradite the Americans from Fort Benton, though some forty-odd were killed. Most people now seem to think that around thirty were killed. The Canadian Parliament seized on this as an issue and always referred to the wolfers as a group of American outlaws and lawless desperadoes, when the only white who was killed was a Canadian, and there were other Canadians in the group. It stirred up a fair amount of anti-American feeling. I think partly this was to assert Canadian sovereignty in the west, because there were a number of American traders who were moving into southern Saskatchewan. There was a whiskey post called Fort Whoop-Up which was flying the stars and stripes. The Canadian government formed the Northwest Mounted Police, which became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and sent them west, first of all, to shut down the whiskey trade. I think this had profound significance for the way the Canadian west developed, because in a sense the police arrived before the settlers, so the Canadian pattern of settlement was different. The red-jacketed Mountie became a mythic symbol in the Canadian mind. In many ways the Cypress Hills Massacre precipitated this. The other half of the book covers an attempt in Hollywood exactly fifty years later to make a movie of the Cypress Hills Massacre. A lot of American producers at that time were using people who claimed to have been outlaws in the American West, like Al Jennings, who was an Oklahoma train robber whose stories had been written up by 0. Henry when they were in prison together; Emett Dalton of the Dalton gang; even Wyatt Earp had a small appearance in Alan Dwan's The Half Breed. So I have a seventeen-year- old boy who's only known as "the Englishman's boy" who is present at the Cypress Hills Massacre. Fifty years later he's a 67-year-old extra in western movies. A megalomaniac producer decides that he has a story to make a great western, if he can only get the story from this character, called Shorty MacAdoo. So that's a long answer, almost as long as the book itself. Isern: But the two parallel time periods, two parallel lines of action are intertwined in the book, and carried off so well. Let me ask the favor of you that you grace us with a passage that introduces the wolfers. Starting with the Cypress Hills Massacre, as it was called in Canada, and very little referred to in the United States. A good piece of descriptive writing, I think, that sets the scene for those guys. Vanderhaeghe: O.K. This is the posse in Fort Benton getting ready to move out. All thirteen assembled in Front Street, sitting their horses in the early morning grey and quiet, mist curling off the coffee-and-cream Missouri, rising into the still air to hang a muslin curtain between the men and wind-sculptured bluffs across the river. It was a force mounted and armed and accoutered without consistency, piebald and paint buffalo runners, blooded bays and chestnuts, Henrys and Sharps and Winchesters and Colts and double-Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 4 of 12 barreled scatterguns, a Derringer in a coat pocket, skinning knives and Bowie knives, hatchets, a Confederate cavalry sabre hung scabbarded on a saddle horn, smoke-stained buckskins and bar-stained broadcloth, broken plug hats and glossy fur caps, loud checked shirts and patched linen, canvas dusters and wool capotes, par fleche-soled moccasins and high-heeled riding boots. Every face bearing a different mark of vice or virtue, motive or resolve. Silence was near complete. The Englishman's boy could hear birds caroling in the thickets down by the river and the horses shifting in the roadway, saddles creaking like the timbers of a ship rocking at anchor, the faint chiming of restless spurs and bridle chains. Someone coughed, but no one spoke. They were waiting on Hardwick. Hardwick was lighting a cigar. He scratched a match with a thumbnail and his face sprang out at them, bright in the dim surround, like a golden countenance in an old painting. His bay pricked his ears at the crack of the match, sidestepped uneasily when the sulfur burst stinging in its nostrils. Hardwick remained seated, careless and comfortable, reins looped on the horn, hands cupped to the flame. He spoke softly to the horse, checking its restive dance. For a moment, he drew on the cigar and studied the shadowy cavalry. Then he nodded and, without raising his voice, said: "I got one thing to say to you boys before we commence this enterprise. I don't tolerate a slacker. If one of you thinks he can slack on Tom Hardwick, take another think and fall out now." There came a pause in which he seemed to be taking thought himself. "And I hope there is no cowards among us," he added. "I won't break bread with a coward." He smiled briefly and that was confusing, as if the smile was taking back or amending what he had just said. The Englishman's boy was sure that was not the case. "Well," said Hardwick, turning his horse, "let's move out." Isern: That nails it. Now we are living it, I think. When you talk about mythic qualities in the Cypress Hills Massacre and the significance of it to Canadian history, it puts me in mind of the other people who have taken this topic up, with whom I know you are familiar, people like Paul Sharp and his book Whoop-Up Country, or Wallace Stegner, of course, who is from the border country himself. What do you think about their work? Vanderhaeghe: I think Whoop-Up Country and Wolf Willow are prairie classics or just plain classics with no qualification. I first read Paul Sharp's Whoop-Up Country when I was ten or eleven years old, and it utterly captivated me. I had no idea at that time about the border country and how fluid it had been between Canada and the United States. And Sharp writes so well. I mean in many ways Sharp writes like a novelist. He has not only a firm grasp on the subject that he is dealing with but he is a very expressive writer. Of course, Stegner is one of the great prairie writers, perhaps the greatest, and Wolf Willow a wonderful blend of fiction, and history done by an amateur, and reminiscence. I think it is a wonderful book. Isern: Speaking of history. It's what I do for a living, of course, so you'll have to forgive me, but I do know that you hold an M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan in History, and even know your graduate advisor there, Lawrence Kitzan. That brings us around to the topic of the lecture you are Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 5 of 12 presenting here at NDSU, "History and the Writing of Fiction." What about history and the writing of fiction? You are working with historical materials, obviously. Vanderhaeghe: I think one of the problems of the historical novel is for a novelist to decide whether he serving one master or two masters. It is a bit like Lincoln's house divided; can it stand? When I began writing a historical novel I had the feeling, because I had some historical training, I could it do it better than a lot of the historical novels I had read. What I found was that there are many pitfalls in the historical novel; there are many compromises. If you think of yourself as a historian, you feel that you may be cheating or not giving your due to things that are important, that you might be bending the facts on occasion. On the other hand, if you are a novelist or if you think as a novelist, and you try and get the record exact and absolutely correct, you often run into questions of artistic integrity. So I think the historical novel turns into a kind of balancing act between your duty to the past and your duty to the novel as an art form. So I followed my sources quite carefully, but I also amended them when I felt it was necessary to do it. I don't think I grossly amended them. But I would never claim that I am writing history. I am writing a historical novel. Isern: Fair enough. It reminds me of your Hollywood character, Harry Vincent, who perhaps has a bigger chasm to straddle when he is working between what he sees as the integrity of Short McAdoo's story and the perversion of it by a Hollywood director. What about Harry Vincent, this Canadian expatriate screenwriter, or would-be screen writer, in Hollywood? Why are you creating this character, why this vehicle? Vanderhaeghe: In many ways he is the Canadian character distilled again and again. I think most Canadians define themselves in opposition to America. We don't know what we are, but we know what we are not. And so Vincent is a young Canadian who has dropped into Hollywood, which is the ultimate American dream factory in the sense that motion pictures have always embodied American aspirations or attempted to portray Americans as they wish to be or think they are. But Vincent is an outsider, he has kind of renounced Canada because he thinks it is a backwater and a place without any real identity and any real sense of itself So he believes that he can choose to go to America and become an American, as many immigrants did. But he has, I think, the kind of detachment that many Canadians have in respect to American popular culture. We are all raised on it. We all watched-- I am 45 years old--I watched all the John Wayne movies. I listened to all the popular music. I read American books and all the rest of it. Yet I always felt a certain detachment from it. A kind of critical distance. I think Harry Vincent exemplifies that. In fact, in my talk tonight I say that he comes closest to the fiction of the objective historian. Detached, distant, and judgmental. At least, he begins to be that way once he thinks he's got the facts. Isern: What are we as readers to make of a novel that begins with the death of a tweedy and rather imperious Englishman setting free an American boy to roam into Canada? I want to make something of this, but I don't know what. Vanderhaeghe: I am not sure if I know myself. But I think in writing this book there was quite a strong sense about the mingling of culture, particularly in the border regions. You had, for instance, the Métis or half-breed, people who worked for the fur company and who might speak French and might be Catholic by religion but also have a strong attachment to native religions. People like the Northwest Mounted Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 6 of 12 Police scout, Jerry Potts. You have the back-and-forth between Canadians and Americans in the border region that Stegner talks about. Stegner would cross over into Canada and know very much that he was an American. On the Canadian side of the border people sang God Save the Queen and they ordered their woolen underwear from Eaton's rather than from Sears Roebuck. But there is a sort of commonality between cultures and peoples that occurred in that region. If I was killing the British Empire, in the person of John Trevelyan Dawe, I was not aware of it. But I think that English-speaking Canadians of my generation were the first people to have to turn their back on the British Empire. I remember when I was six years old being taken to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth at a theater. This was an important event, but by the time I was twenty-five years old it was laughable. For most people my age it was nothing to take seriously. So I sort of came in on the tail end of the empire, when Canadians were still British subjects and not Canadian citizens, and I think Canadians of one generation earlier were like my character Harry Vincent said, they didn't know which to be, English or American. They didn't know where to put their allegiance. Whether they were going to be fully North American, which would mean being an American, or whether they were some transplantation of British values into North America. Isern: We might expect those kind of intersections and ambivalences and identity questions in the book when we have in the front pages quotations from Donald Creighton, the masterly Canadian historian, and in the back pages a credit to Paul Sharp, an American who crossed into Canada in his work. Vanderhaeghe: You know Robertson Davies once wrote a book called The Voice from the Attic. He claimed that Canada was the voice from the attic because it was the clearinghouse from the best of America and Britain. That we got British books and British ideas and we got American books and American ideas and so we were more fully conversant with the two great English-speaking nations. We were mediators and middlemen between them. So maybe that's why Creighton's at the front of the book and Sharp's at the back. Isern: We can get overly cerebral sometimes with these questions. It seems to me there is a wonderful one-word lecture in the middle of the book that reminds us of the affective side, as opposed to the intellectual side, of identity. I am thinking of the scene in the novel where Harry Vincent and the woman whom he greatly admires, Rachel, are sitting with Harry's invalid mother who's down from Saskatoon. He's brought her down to Hollywood, as I recall, and they don't think she knows what they are talking about, but he is saying it doesn't mean anything to have left Canada behind because there is nothing to leave behind, or words like that. And then his mother kind of perks up and says a single word, "Home." Vanderhaeghe: I suppose I am Harry Vincent's mother. Because the place that I live, most specifically the place I was born and grew up and have lived almost my entire life, is Saskatchewan. I think of myself as the definition of a provincial. I have never felt fully comfortable living any place else. It's my place, it's my home. So first of all I have this local patriotism, which is to the place I was born and I was raised, and then I have a larger patriotism to my country. I can't necessarily put my finger on what my country is or what it means. I only know that when I am away from my country it's my standard for judging everything else, and I get a sense of myself more completely than I do when I am at home. So home for me becomes more powerful when I am away from it. And it has very little to do with politics, it has more to do with geography and values, whatever that means. Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 7 of 12 Isern: If I can be permitted a terrible pun, the country where you live -- "a river runs through it." I wanted to ask you if you would favor us with another passage where that river figures, the ice-breaking passage on the Saskatchewan River. Vanderhaeghe: This is Harry Vincent speaking to Rachel Gold in this rest home that his mother is in. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We'd be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn't want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don't think that's ignoble. It is then my mother says a surprising thing. "Home." Loudly and distinctly. Both Rachel and I are taken aback. "What Ma?" She points to the window. "What Ma?" I ask. "What?" "Home," she says one more time before retreating into silence. Isern: Set side by side all the political implications such as this particular movie producer conceives, and then the emotional tie, and we have a pretty clear alternative between the two as to which is the one that is admirable. This passage is kind of a trick, too, on my part, moving toward the questionable point of view. Because we have watchers on the bank of the South Saskatchewan watching the ice break out. Reading the press packets that come from your publisher, I catch these little remarks of the author as "observer" and "watcher." I think in particular of that first story in your book of short stories, Man Descending, the one that's called "The Watcher," which has this boy's point of view. He is a watcher and he doesn't want to be a player, and he refuses to be one, which is key to the story. That's kind of a safe perspective, as he sees it. What is it to an author? Vanderhaeghe: I think that in many ways writers have to be detached. If they are too involved in the situation they miss too much. I would rather watch people relating to one another and watch how they operate than operate myself. I mean I have very bad habits. If my wife and I go out to dinner she complains continually about the fact I am not listening to her, I am listening to the conversation at the Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 8 of 12 next table. So there's that floating quality that many writers have. Their engagement is never total. They're not always fully in the moment, they are drawing back from it. That is an accusation that Tolstoy's wife continually made against him, I am not comparing myself to Tolstoy, I am just suggesting that this seems a quality that many writers have. That they tend to be disengaged. And they tend to be observers. Now I think that was accentuated in my case because I was an only child. You're talking about "The Watcher," and there are minor autobiographical elements to that story. I was an only child who was surrounded by adults, and I learned that if I kept my mouth shut and sat quietly in the corner, I could find out a lot of interesting things, because adults would forget that you were there and they would start talking about adult things that you shouldn't know or hear about. So that was kind of thrilling, to hear secrets or hear forbidden things. Now I don't know if it is that desire for secrets that turned me into a writer or I was born with that desire for secrets and that all writers are. Isern: It occurs to me that it is two things. First, an author-watcher who in fact absorbs material, for lack of a better word, by being an observer. And then second, an author who creates an observer as a perspective for a book or story. Vanderhaeghe: I think that the observer, that point of view, is a dangerous one actually to employ in fiction, that is, a character who seems to the reader detached and disengaged, because in fact those types of characters are often dislikeable. Readers don't like them. They don't like their coldness. They don't like their calculation. Isern: Then why are you doing all these dangerous things? We have Harry Vincent, with his sense of is a detachment… Vanderhaeghe: Because one of the things fiction is about or should be about is to confront people with analogies. I think that many people, if they see a disengaged character like that, their own disengagement, their own detachment is brought home to them, and that will make them feel uncomfortable. I think that one of the things that fiction should do is make people feel uncomfortable. Now I don't think that people are aware of that. I don't think people say, well, I'm a lot like the kid who's in "The Watcher." They are more inclined to make moral judgments about that character. I think that fiction in which everybody's wearing a white hat and everybody's wearing a black hat, and it's very, very clear with whom you are supposed to sympathize--that strikes me as a bit of cheat. In some ways Harry Vincent is both noble and ignoble. He's willfully stupid about certain things. He's cautious. He's detached. He's cynical. But despite all of those things he arrives, almost unwillingly, at a better decision than other characters do. I think the Harry Vincents in the world are closer to most human beings than the person who is clearly good. I think most of us have to struggle to do the right thing. Isern: A lot of these characters, I find, it's not a black hat, it's not a white hat, it's not a grey hat either, it's more like they take one off and put on another. I really like Alec Monkman now and then. And then a few pages later I just hate that old rascal. And now I'm crossing over into another type of character seems to recur, I don't know if this is a watcher character or what type this is. People like Alex Monkman in Homesick, or Carl Tollefson in Man Descending, or King Walsh in Things as They Are, or for that matter, Shorty MacAdoo in Englishman's Boy. These guys are down on their luck, their lines have negative slope; what do you find useful or insightful about these over-the-hill guys? Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 9 of 12 Vanderhaeghe: For me as a writer, it is what people older have that younger people don't have, obviously, and that is kind of a cliché: they have experience. They have lived more. It doesn't necessarily mean that all that living and experience always leads to the best or right decision. But they have that. So I would say that they have depth. They have substance. They have solidity. They are heavier characters. So that interests me. The other thing is that I was a child of the 60s and was on the fringes of hippie-dom. But the one thing I could never accept from my generation was the attack on the elders. Because I always felt that we grew up in pretty privileged circumstances, whereas our fathers and mothers went through the depression, they fought the Second World War, they lost a large segment of their life. A lot of them lost their youth. I had uncles who were riding the rails when they were 14 years old. Jumping on trains. And when they were 21, in 1939, the war came along and they were in the army. There was a huge chunk taken out of their lives. And that made them the people that we in the sixties were supposed to disparage and hate without understanding why they were the way they were. It seemed to me that their heroism was more earned than our so-called intellectual heroism. And the same thing with my grandparents, who were immigrants. I just finished talking about never really being able to leave Saskatchewan. And it seemed to me kind of a heroic thing that someone could pick up, leave their family, leave their language, throw themselves into a new country, and make a life for themselves. That always struck me as an incredibly brave thing to do. Something that I could not do. If I was to pick up and go to Belgium when I was 21 years old and try to learn how to speak Flemish and operate in that society and all the rest of it, and forget everything that I had grown up with, I would have found that almost impossible. Isern: Let's consider, then, Vera. Alex Monkman, in the novel Homesick, is kind of the king of the town of Connaught, Saskatchewan. He owns every business in town, it seems like, even though he doesn't appear to be particularly wealthy. The daughter who's been in the city, Vera, comes home to bring her boy out and raise him in a prairie town. This is one where more than any other book of yours, family relationships are the key. Reminds me a bit of Larry Woiwode's writing in North Dakota. Sometimes skipping a generation in family relationships. Where does that come from? Talk to me a little bit about what goes into making that book, where reconnecting family relationships is so important? Vanderhaeghe: I think it's part of my own experience of family, which may be slightly different than other people's because I was an only child. I think only children tend to make allegiances with adults rather than children. Within the family an only child will often attach himself to one parent or the other. Sometimes they will switch allegiances in a case of Realpolitik. I think as an only child I felt the intensity of the family situation more than I would have had I had brothers and sisters. As an only child you're the center of good attention but also bad attention. Praise or blame can't be spread around. You don't have someone your own age to relate to you, so you have to relate to adults within the family structure. I think that intensifies the family experience. Isern: This boy in the novel is an only child. Vanderhaeghe: Yes. Isern: What about that place, Connaught, Saskatchewan, the town'? Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 10 of 12 Vanderhaeghe: It has a lot of similarities to the town I grew up in, though I took liberties with dates and things like that. I grew up in a town that was a small farming town until they discovered potash and there was an influx of people. Americans from New Mexico from the potash mines in Carlsbad. German engineers from Germany. Portuguese road workers. Miners from all over Canada. Now in the case of my novel, because of the age of the boy, I had it happen, rather than 1957, I had it happen in 1964. Where there is the big expansion in the town and the town booms and that booming allows the woman, Vera, to set up a restaurant and make a success of it. So in that sense that town is grounded in my experience of a town like that, a place that had been a really sleepy hamlet, maybe 300 people, and then suddenly, the population never did get very big, but it increased ten-fold in a year. Isern: Lucky for Vera's cafe. Vanderhaeghe: Yes, exactly. Again, not to make too much of it, but my aunt ran a cafe, and I washed dishes in it. Isern: I am a great consumer of prairie literature of all kinds, from nonfictional history of objective type to the most romantic and most realistic and post-modern prairie fiction, you name it, the whole water-front. Here is something that really struck me about the whole body of your work: I am looking for nature in it. I contrast it with your neighbor across the province, Sharon Butala, who's more and more turning to nature in her work. Whereas yours is much more community, family, a set of relationships, these sorts of things. How come you're so different from these other prairie writers? Vanderhaeghe: I think in part I consciously steered away from writing the way that Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell had written. Prairie literature could certainly be that, you know, but it could be something else. And I had a feeling that if I attempted to write what they had already written, I would do a bad job of it. So in many ways I purposefully steered away from nature as a powerful or dominating presence in the book. The way it is in As for Me and My House, or in W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind, it's there, it's palpable, it's big! I decided to be aiming my work more between relationships with people in that landscape than the relationship of people to the landscape. The landscape is present, and it forms the psychology of the people, but it is at one remove. Isern: Sometimes viewed through a window. Vanderhaeghe: Yes. Isern: I was talking earlier about some of the character types and points of view that seem to recur. I've got to ask you about Billy and Gene. These Billy and Gene stories in the middle of Men Descending. Who are these guys, and are you just have fun with us there? Vanderhaeghe: I grew up with guys who weren't too far from Billy and Gene. A lot of these kids that I grew up with, they were pretty tough kids. They bopped from one mining town to the another. Sometimes their parents weren't particularly good parents. And so that's part of them [Billy and Gene]. I am not saying they are people that I knew, but people I knew could do things like they did, or could contemplate Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 11 of 12 doing things like they did. And then Billy, who is the younger brother, again he's one of these detached characters. He is slightly cynical. He knows why his older brother gets the girls. And why his older brother gets the acclaim. He knows how the small-town world works. He doesn't whine about it, he states it as a fact. He's able to stand back from things enough that he can characterize what teachers are doing, what his brother's doing, what all these small-town types are doing. And when he does get engaged, it is usually a disaster. In one of the stories, Billy -- who doesn't come from a particularly good family, and his brother has a bad reputation, and Billy is sort of stained at least in the same way-- Billy tries to take up with a very churchie Baptist girl, and it is a comic disaster, a black comedy. And Billy, in his deepest soul, knows that it could never have turned out any other way but what it did. Yet he grimly and glumly hangs onto the idea that if he keeps going to the Baptist Church and presenting himself as a respectable boy, maybe there will be this leap of faith on someone's part. Isern: But we don't know if that worked or not? Vanderhaeghe: No. And I would say it didn't. I would say that Billy knew it was not going to work. It was a hopeless faith that led him to do what he did. Isern: Let's go to Saskatoon, maybe to the china department at Eaton's, and visit with Ed, the key character in My Present Age. I don't know what to make of him. Whether he is Billy and Gene or both of them, or maybe he is an adolescent or another "man descending." But he's kind of a troubling figure, too, as so many of yours are. I wonder what we can expect of Ed in coming years. The book has some unsatisfying aspects to it that I suspect are exactly what they are supposed to be. Talk about Ed and My Present Age. Vanderhaeghe: I think Ed is a man who chooses failure. He's intelligent. He's witty. But he's obviously adolescent. He is a kind of grotesque Peter Pan. Ed is from the sixties generation. He can see everybody else going, as far as he is concerned, wrong in what they are doing. What they are selling out for. The mistakes they are making along the road. He eviscerates everybody, and he can eviscerate himself. But he chooses to be a cartoon. He chooses to be a grotesque. The closest that I can think of to an example is the Russian novelist Goncharov's Oblomov, who never gets out of bed and is always talking that he will someday do something. And of course, as in many Russian novels, there is always a German who in fact is disciplined, hard-working, and does a lot of things, and Oblomov keeps telling himself that someday I will be like that German, I will actually get out of bed and I will do something. Ed is a bit like that. He's a case of arrested development. Some of his self-hatred or disgust with himself is projected onto other people, which doesn't mean that what he says about them isn't correct. Because most of the time it is correct. I wrote that novel when I was 31 or 32 years old, and I think that a lot of the novel is motivated by my feelings about my generation. I probably didn't know when I was writing the novel what I was attempting to say any more than Ed knows exactly what he is attempting to say. It just seemed to me that there was a kind of shallowness to a lot of my friends and myself and everybody when we were going into our 30s. A kind of undirected, vacuous kind of quality to us. Now in hindsight, that's not true. I think that is what someone feels like when they are 30 years old and are angry about things. Guy Vanderhaeghe Oral History Interview, 1997 Page 12 of 12 Isern: Maybe it's a good thing you wrote that novel then. Vanderhaeghe: Yes. What I was trying to do was write a black comedy. But the comedy kept on getting blacker and blacker, and as it got blacker and blacker it got less and less funny, so that there were Benny and Ed and Stanley Rubachek and Ed's wife, they became more and more grotesque as the novel went along. Ed became more and more pitiful and more and more prone to sentimentality about himself. And more and more unattractive. I never set out to write an attractive character, I set out to write a flawed character, but I think he became more and more unattractive as the book went along. Isern: So tell us, Guy, are you headed for Hollywood or are you rooted, like those few surviving American elms in North America, in Saskatoon? Vanderhaeghe: I can't imagine myself being content any place else than someplace on the prairies or the plains. For better or worse, I think I am going to remain a prairie person. Most likely I'll be in Saskatoon for as far as I can foresee. Isern: Do your duty to the Board of Trade of Saskatoon. What's great about the City of Bridges? Vanderhaeghe: It's a pretty city. It's got a river running through it. It's got bridges. It's got a very pretty university campus. It's got great things like jazz festivals, children's theater festivals, it's got three theater companies, it's got a symphony. I think Saskatoon is actually quite a cultural city, and I think it has so much in those respects because it is so isolated from any other large center, so that people make the culture there rather than drive off to consume it. I think in that way it is really an interesting city. I lived in Ottawa, which is a national capital and has a larger population and has big theater companies, and I didn't find it intellectually or culturally as stimulating as Saskatoon is, because people were either going to the National Art Center to see bourgeois, high-culture ballet and the rest of it, or the French Canadians were jumping on the train to go to Montreal for the weekend, and the English Canadians were flying to Toronto or New York for the weekend. But nobody was doing anything in Ottawa. Painters and writers and musicians and actors are doing things in Saskatoon, and I think that's the best thing about the city. It's got a very active art scene and an active writing community. Isern: That said, we are fortunate that you are willing to desert the charms of Saskatoon in January for the charms of Fargo in January. Enough said on that, and I am truly looking forward to your lecture this evening. Vanderhaeghe: Thank you. Copyright 2011 by Institute for Regional Studies & University Archives North Dakota State University Libraries This transcript is from the interview that occurred between Guy Vanderhaeghe and Tom Isern prior to a lecture Vanderhaeghe gave at NDSU. A transcript was donated along with the cassette containing the interview. It is not known who developed the original transcript, but it was nonetheless scanned and formatted. Credit was given to Roger Grimm for recording the interview. Very little editing, other than formatting has been done to this transcript version by the Institute staff.
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