Q&A: David Bergen

By Jared Bland • October 24, 2008 • No Comments

Giller prize winner David Bergen’s new book, The Retreat, is among this fall’s very best novels. Instead of commenting on this myself, I’ll refer you to Danielle Groen’s review of the book from our October/November issue; she says most of what I have to say, and better than I could.

I spoke with David Bergen a few weeks ago in Toronto. He’ll return to town next week as a part of the International Festival of Authors, for a reading on October 31st and a roundtable hosted by The Walrus‘s own Jeremy Keehn on November 1st. Click those links to buy tickets, or enter a contest to win some courtesy of IFOA and The Walrus here.

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I know that your last novel sat with you for quite a while before it came to shape. How did this one arrive?

I suppose it came more quickly. With The Time in Between I had written a non-fiction piece previous to the novel, and I used the non-fiction work to create the novel, because the non-fiction stuff just was not working. I discovered I’m not a non-fiction writer, not in the way I want to be—not like a Bruce Chatwin. If only I could write like that, which really isn’t non-fiction I suppose, he bends the truth very much. But you can bend the truth more with fiction, so I decided to write the novel. Because I see my job—I see it as a job, and I see it as work, it’s not something where I wait for inspiration—so in this instance, The Retreat came to me as an image of a family driving across the country, arriving in Kenora, going to this commune. I began the story with the second section, called “The Retreat,” and the first section, “The Island,” came later, when I found Raymond. And when I say ‘found’ Raymond, I think it’s important to say that some of these characters, like Nelson and like Raymond, they were found, or sort of walked into the door, and I said, “Oh wow, here’s Raymond, here’s Raymond delivering fish and chickens to the Retreat.” And of course the unconscious is at work when that happens, and you have to allow it to open up, to be found. So that’s how the novel began.

I had been talking to a man, an older man, telling him a story about my father. We had gone on a trip. We had six children in our family, we lived in Calgary, and I was about 11 at that time. We were taking a trip to Vancouver, and we had four cats. And these were four kittens, that had just been born. We were heading up towards Banff, and we had the cats on our laps and we were playing with them, and my father stopped at the edge of this lake, took the cats, walked out, drowned them. And my sisters were just weeping. I realized after I told this man this story that I had to go to my office and write this scene and that’s sort of how it began. It’s a bleak scene, but I thought it worked for the foreboding of the novel.

You said Raymond kind of walked in the door for you. I was thinking of the section where his brother Marcel’s visiting and he says that “Our problem is we’re too nice, we’re too fucking nice.” It seems to me that in the book—and at the Retreat—there’s a group of people trying to find a better way of being in the world. If that’s true, is Marcel right? Is that where Raymond starts? And how does he change by the end of the book from where he walked in the door to you?

Marcel is ten years, twelve years older, had more experience in the world, and is trying to inform his baby brother that he may be a little bit naïve about how the world works. And in fact that comes quite true. He accepts authority too readily, and he understands that later in the book—when he says ‘Hart put me in the car and I let him, he put me in the boat and I let him, he put me on the island and I let him.’ The incident on the highway when he’s stopped by Hart is his reckoning, his ‘I will no longer let someone do this to me’ moment, with certain consequences, of course. He chooses in that way, but that makes things follow other ways.

So he learns to be not too nice…

Well I suppose that’s true. It strikes me when I’m in Winnipeg—in Winnipeg we have a very large aboriginal population—in Winnipeg I watched a man being arrested in the area where I have my office. They wanted to handcuff him, and he was refusing. He was aboriginal and there were two policemen, and he was arguing with them. They were trying to convince him that he should be handcuffed. I was amazed at how tenacious he was. I don’t think he’d really done anything wrong. He was simply loitering, as people tend to do in the downtown area. And finally he gave in, and put his hands behind his back, and they put him paddy wagon. And I thought, ‘Run! You’re too nice, you know.’ Authority’s a scary thing. That’s a huge issue in the world, and particularly in this novel. How Raymond himself confronts authority.

You talked about how Marcel’s ten or twelve years older, and that seems to be another major idea. You have two sets of people—a clearly defined group of kids, and then older people. I was thinking of that moment where Everett says to Lizzie, “I don’t want to be old.” The book is so much about these two main characters who can’t help but get older. Are we doomed as we become older?

It does seem that way from this novel. I remember my son, who was three at the time, he loved mathematics. He had a hard time going to sleep and we would give him numbers to add up. Large numbers, and he’d get the answer. Then at some point he said he had a fear of death. And then he said, ‘So, Dad, I want to be a number. Because numbers never die. They go on forever.’ There’s something about children, the innocence of these epiphanies they have. But also their understanding of the world, more innocent but also more open and accepting to change. Adult stasis—that’s what Everett’s balking at, what he sees in his father, mother, in the doctor. That adults can be so stringent in their black and white world. And in the children—and there’s definitely a divide between the children and adults here, which wasn’t conscious, but as I was writing it was quite apparent…

It’s very Romantic, capital R…

Indeed. And I’m not for remaining a child. But what I am for is maintaining imagination, creativity. The wonder of the world. The child’s view in the face of adult folly.

There’s also this strong motif of retrospection—almost mournful. Again and again there are headlights drifting away, rearview mirrors looking back. It’s a book that I anticipated would be nostalgic, but I didn’t really find it that nostalgic.

That’s good, because I’m not interested in nostalgia, because nostalgia tends to spill over into sentimentality. I’m probably too rigorous in my balking at sentimentality. I’m really not interested in a ‘man of feeling.’

On a more process based note, this is a book where a lot happens in what you could call the narrative negative space, by which I mean it’s episodic in its structure but not in a consecutive way. There are things missing and a lot happens off stage. How deliberately do you think through what’s left off? How fully do you know this story beyond what’s on the page?

I know a lot more of the story then is on the page, and a lot more about the characters. When I’m working with Ellen [Seligman, Bergen’s editor at McClelland & Stewart], she’ll have a question about what a character’s saying or doing, why are they saying this, and I’ll give her a whole backstory. Even a psychological motive in a character. She’ll say, ‘Well how am I to know that, why haven’t you told us that?’ In some ways, I suppose, I may hold back too much. It’s almost at her behest that I bring out more than I have previously.

What books were not necessarily influences, but what books were important to you while writing this novel? What books did you think of?

Contrary to what most writers say, I read voraciously when I write. I don’t worry about being influenced. I say if you want to influence me, go ahead! If you think about it, if I’m constantly writing, and I tell you I never read while I write, when the hell am I going to read?

Did you have any books that you kept in mind? Not necessarily as templates, but as inspirations?

For this particular novel? I’d have to get back to you. I think there were books I kept going back to. I remember going to The Crossing [by Cormac McCarthy]. That would have been one. Just to look for how he moves one character from one place to another. Usually he moves them by horse, but how his characters speak to one another.

What’s your favourite McCarthy novel?

For the sheer weight of the prose, Blood Meridian. One of the best books—American novels, anyway—of the twentieth century, in my view.

To talk a bit more about structure, you mentioned “The Island,” which really holds together on its own. Now that you’re done with it, how do the three parts relate to one another?

I believe that structure is absolutely essential in a novel, and I think it’s one of the things that a lot of novice writers have most of their difficulties with. If you don’t have structure—let’s go to the old house metaphor—if you don’t know what the foundation, what the shape of the thing is to be, you realize that there’s no structure, no flow. The rooms don’t lead into each other properly. So those three sections were the overall structure of the novel. Not that I had a total sense of the structure when I began, but that idea. “The Clearing” came to me while I was reading Heiddeger—I know, this sounds really pretentious—but at one point Lewis is talking to Everett about beating your way through the bush, and how you hold a tool. In a sense these people don’t know how to use the tools that have been giving them. “The Clearing,” in some ways, is a clearing for the reader, how things come together, but it’s also Raymond and Lizzie coming together after beating their way through the bush.

In some ways, my method, perhaps—and one probably shouldn’t talk about methods, but let’s use that word—my method is to drop a character into the novel, offer something of their character, but not too much, and then pull that character back, leaving the reader wanting more. And Nelson would be an example of that. You get a sense of where he’s come from, and some sense of where he’s going, but you might want to learn much more about him than you know. I’m not into wrapping things up neatly. I’m not into concluding in the way that we would like to have our world concluded. So that’s perhaps one of the ways I work as a writer. People in real life, they drop into our world and they drop out—they disappear.

Beyond the obvious research elements of previous work, how was the actual writing of this different, compared to a book set in Vietnam.

Well, the Vietnam novel was in some ways much more personal, much more autobiographical. I was on a quest to find the novelist Bao Ninh. Charles Boatman is on a quest to find a novelist in there. I used a lot of the notes that I took when I talked to people in Vietnam. I had four spiral notebooks full of conversations, of how people spoke, vernacular. So in that way, the research was almost happenstance, but it was there, definitely there—I experienced that world in perhaps the way Charles or Ada would have. This book was different, because it was more finding the story and finding the characters as I went, and then discovering the narrative and realizing that it almost had more of a thriller element than The Time In Between. And all the time writing it, thinking, ‘Nobody’s going to want to read this book.’ And then people coming to me and saying, ‘Oh, I think this is the best book you’ve written.’ And I’m wondering how does that work? I have no inkling of how people are going to respond to a book. And then I wonder, well, if you think it’s the best book I’ve ever written, what do you think of the other books? There’s a lot of self-doubt in the process.

Lizzie says at one point, when she’s talking to Harris, that she doesn’t like true stories. And I’ve read in interviews you’ve given about the hundreds of pages of non-fiction you wrote about Vietnam. Is Lizzie speaking a bit for you here?

Because I couldn’t do the non-fiction?

Yeah, beyond your assessment of your abilities with non-fiction, is fiction just your…

Yes. I’m not a non-fiction reader even, really. I will read non-fiction about literature, but I have a really hard time with non-fiction. I think it’s the literal. I think I’m anti-literal. I grew up with the Bible. And I grew up with the Bible being taught as a literal book. And it was only later in life that I realized, ‘Hold it! I’ve been duped…’

That bush didn’t really burn…

Exactly. My father was a preacher, and I had to memorize the Bible, and I had this wonderful epiphany that this is not true, and that makes it more true, and more beautiful. So I think that what fiction does is elevate the imagination more than non-fiction can, and gives you a world—and this is a cliché—that’s so much more true than what’s real or factual. So if you can bend the world around you to fit the story that you want to tell, you can create something that will offer the reader something much greater than what non-fiction can offer.

What are you working on now?

Yeah, I’m taking notes, and finding my characters. Someone asked me that in an email, and I said that I’m writing a novel set in Canada or the United States about an ex-missionary who works for the CIA.

Really?

That’s the idea, at least. It could go anywhere.

Q&A: David Bergen

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