David Bergen

In the Clearing

A new novel from Winnipeg author David Bergen arrives in bookstores in fall 2010. Titled The Matter With Morris, it is his sixth novel, and definitely one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year in Canadian publishing.

In conversation recently at The Nook, a busy Winnipeg diner, Bergen suggested that the book marks ‘a real departure’ in his writing. The story revolves around Morris Schutt, a fifty-one year old journalist who is driven to examine and evaluate his existence after the death of his son. “It’s got humour, which is unusual for me,” Bergen explains. “I mean, I can be a funny guy! Not in my writing so much, and I’ve been called too dark, too spare, too bleak, that sort of thing. But this, even though it’s spare, dark, and bleak, has a sardonic edge running beneath the narrative.”

Currently Bergen is the Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg. He read from his new novel this past January at the university. Three days a week he settles into his office on campus to write, and the rest of the time he meets with students and members of the public to discuss their own work one-on-one. It is a terrific opportunity for aspiring writers to get up close and personal with one of the most compelling authors working in the country today.

Born in Port Edward, British Columbia, in 1957, Bergen grew up the son of a minister in a devout Mennonite household. His earliest books were well received, but it was his third novel, The Case of Lena S., that vaulted him to the forefront of Canadian literature. The erotic charge in his writing proved impossible to ignore.

Bergen won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his fourth novel, The Time in Between, in which he tells the memorable and haunting story of Charles Boatman, a veteran of the Vietnam War. Thirty years after the war Charles leaves his home in British Columbia to return to Vietnam. His three children are forced to deal with the reality of his disappearance, and the mysteries attached to it.

In his most recent novel, The Retreat, Bergen offers his disturbing account of Lewis and Norma Byrd, the troubled parents of four children. At the insistence of Norma, the family travels from Calgary to Kenora, Ontario, where nearby there exists a commune called ‘The Retreat’, which is led by Dr. Amos, a spiritual and intellectual guide. The Byrd family breaks down slowly. The children are set adrift.

The overwhelming strength of these books lies in the way that Bergen unfolds the intricate relationships among family members. With his crisp, probing prose, he digs into emotional and sexual tensions that many authors leave unexamined. He is interested in relationships of all kinds, especially the connections between lovers, between children, and between parents and children. “We seem to have this normal idea of what a relationship should look like,” Bergen says. “I think fiction allows you to explore those things in a very free way that non-fiction doesn’t, that talking doesn’t, that lecturing doesn’t. Novelists are probably lucky in the sense that they get to say things that other people don’t get to say.” It is intriguing to think ahead to the new novel, The Matter with Morris, to imagine where Bergen might dare to tread.

This interview begins with Bergen talking about his connections to Carol Shields. He discusses his approach to formulating the young characters in his novels, and why many of his most unforgettable characters seem to exist at the fringe of society. Interestingly Bergen talks about the influence of certain philosophers on his work, specifically Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Here is a conversation with an author confident in his abilities, always searching, and moving deeper and deeper into the complexities that dwell in the most fundamental human relationships.

CI: You are currently the Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence at the University of Winnipeg. A few of her short stories have lingered with me over the years, one in particular called ‘Milk Bread Beer Ice’, which I have always remembered. Out of curiosity, since you are in the writer-in-residence position, what has your connection been over the years to the work of Carol Shields?

DB: Well, I have two connections. I have the actual personal connection to her because she was in Winnipeg and I got to know her, I would say, in a very superficial way. The biggest connection would be to her as a writer, a writer who I admired and came to somewhat late, I would imagine. Probably after her fifth novel I was aware of her, probably along with everybody else! I mean, I was aware of Carol Shields, and Prairie Fire magazine would do pieces and would have her photograph on the front, and I would read her short stories. Orange Fish I thought had some great stories in there. It was when The Stone Diaries came out, and she became really huge, that I became more aware of her, and probably read her more avidly because that book piqued my curiosity.

I think that what I took from Carol Shields was her long view of the publishing world and writing. She came to it quite late. She didn’t clamour for a lot of attention. She simply did the job, did it well, and eventually you hope the attention comes to you – and it did to her. It was her ability to keep going, slogging through, because the publishing industry is very tough. It’s looking for hot, young, sexy writers who can sell books. Carol was none of those things, but she was a good writer and told a really good story, and also she was a wonderful person – a real genteel person.

CI: In the role of writer-in-residence, when you are consulting with students and people from the general public, presumably about their writing and their ideas about writing, what is the most enjoyable aspect of that process for you?

DB: It’s funny. I’ll be perfectly frank. The most enjoyable part is that they pay me a good chunk of money to sit in an office for three days a week by myself and write. That gives me time to write. The other two days I spend with the public. They come, and it’s nice. I used to be in the classroom a lot. I taught creative writing, I taught English, and I taught - oh god – sociology! Awful stuff like that, some of the social sciences. It was the kids that I liked. I liked the interaction with the actual students, and the relationships. I hated the marking. I hated the preparation. I didn’t mind the classroom time. What I am getting now is, with people coming in, sort of classroom time, and some one-on-one, which is great.

CI: In this opportunity you obviously have a fair bit of time to work on your own writing. As I understand it, there is a new book called The Matter with Morris to be released later this year. What are you able to tell us at this point about the next book?

DB: It’s a real departure. I feel it’s a real departure for me in the sense that all my books are somewhat autobiographical in theme, probably in tone and worldview, and sort of a moral stance, but this one is perhaps even more that way. Not that I am Morris Schutt, the main character of the novel, but he’s a fifty-one year old man who happens to be a columnist, a journalist, and against his will his son goes to Afghanistan, and he is killed there. And then it’s the fallout. Is it a mid-life book? In a sense, but more than that it is much more a moral reckoning of who he is in the world, how he came to be where he is, how he raised his boy, how he relates to his two daughters, one eighteen and one twenty-five, and his estranged wife, Lucille.

It’s got humour, which is unusual for me. I mean, I can be a funny guy! Not in my writing so much, and I’ve been called too dark, too spare, too bleak, that sort of thing. But this, even though it’s spare, dark, and bleak, has a sardonic edge running beneath the narrative. It’s very much from Morris’s point-of-view – a man who happens to be sort of fringe-Mennonite who wants to be Jewish! He reads the old writers, like Cicero and Plato, to figure out who he is and how to live the best life.

I had fun with it. It wrote very quickly, which, you know - Updike said that if a story isn’t writing well, maybe you should just toss it. It’s the stories that write quickly and smoothly that are probably the best ones. We’ll see. We’ll see how it’s received.

CI: One thing that struck me about your novels is the way that you build the young characters, specifically Ada in The Time in Between in the early scenes when she is young, and the way that she relates to her father, or Lizzy in The Retreat and her unique mix of naïveté and solid perception of what is going on around her. You have kids. You have been a teacher. What aspect of your experience most informs how you write children?

DB: Observation. Empathy. Harking back to my own memories of shame and embarrassment and failure as a teenager! I have four children, three boys and one girl. The girl is the oldest.

I think that, even in this latest novel, Morris has an eighteen-year-old daughter who, in many ways, is much wiser than he is, and he knows that. He can see that, and he is trying to figure out how that came to be. I think that, in some ways, Lizzy in The Retreat and even Ada in The Time in Between have a certain wisdom that they bring to the stories, to their fathers, and to the families, that these men can’t find. I’m not sure why I do that. That would probably be for an outsider to figure out. I’m not sure that I can go into it and analyze how these things work, and say this is why my female characters who are young in my novels happen to be somewhat naïve and yet they have a certain wisdom that they bring, a precociousness that they bring to the story. Maybe I just want to imbue them with that. And I see my own folly. I see male folly in some way. I think that perhaps females have an edge over us.

CI: I thought about this question for a while, and I am not quite sure how to ask it. There are characters in your books – I think of Charles Boatman living on the side of a mountain in a caboose, and Dr. Amos in his Retreat – these are characters that are very much on the fringes of Canadian society. I am curious about how this allows you to present an idea of what is ‘normal’ in relation to these people that have stepped back, or stepped out, of society. What has drawn you to these characters at the fringe?

DB: That’s a really tough question. When I write my novels and I find my characters, I am aware of where they come from, I’m aware of where they’re going, and I’m aware of where they are. I mean, I discover this along the way, and I try to figure out motivation. I think motivation is very important. I try to figure out the structure of the novel, but I usually don’t question why Charles Boatman is in a caboose on Sumas Mountain. At some point I think to myself, ‘that is a really good place to have him’. In some way he’s running. He’s running from his past and what has happened to him in his life.

Dr. Amos? In many ways I have known people like this, too. I knew a Dr. Amos - just gave him a different name. I have seen the Charles Boatmans when I was in Vietnam. I saw them coming back and trying to find something, and then talking to them and realizing that they were at the fringe. They were at the fringe of the world. If they are at the fringe emotionally and psychologically, then perhaps physically they’ll be at the fringe as well. Maybe it’s too obvious a motif. I don’t know, but it seemed to work. Put a guy in a caboose – that will tell you something about his heart.

CI: This idea of the fringe struck me especially in The Retreat where you have Dr. Amos living off near Kenora, and he has separated himself from the world. Then the Byrd family arrives, and you have Norma Byrd, who is very much resisting the idea of a normal family life, and she is drawn to Dr. Amos and the Retreat. Have you found that, when you bring these types of characters together, you uncover an interesting way to explore what is ‘normal’ in Canadian culture, or in our contemporary secular society more generally?

DB: I would have to say that I don’t approach my writing as a Canadian. I don’t think to myself, ‘okay, I’m a Canadian novelist, living in Winnipeg, in Wolseley, who is creating a Canadian character, and I’m going to show Canadian themes and Canadian settings’. Yes, that is all true, that is all there, but I tend – maybe this will sound rather arrogant – but I tend to take a more universal approach. I would hope that Charles Boatman or Dr. Amos or Lizzy Byrd or Ada Boatman - or Morris Schutt, who in his case comes from Winnipeg - would fit into any sort of context, that they could be anywhere, and that any reader in any part of the world would be able to latch onto the emotional and the intellectual component of a Charles Boatman.

So I don’t necessarily take the Canadian cultural angle when I am telling a story, although I am very, very clear in my own head that I cannot put a character somewhere that I can’t imagine, or haven’t been necessarily. I have to be aware of that place very specifically. I wouldn’t put a guy in Paris just because I think a book would sell better because it’s set in Paris. I did that when I was young when I first started to write. I thought that nobody would read a story that was set in Winnipeg. Then I wrote The Case of Lena S. where Lena Schellendal works here at ‘The Nook’! You sort of all of a sudden realize ‘well, hold it, like Bellow made his Chicago, maybe I can perhaps create a Winnipeg’. Even Carol Shields – to go back to Carol Shields – she did that amazingly well. She came from Chicago, settled in Winnipeg, and then created a sort of mythical story around this place. She changed street names. She got it all wrong - intentionally, I am sure, but she said, ‘okay, Winnipeg is going to be the place where part of The Stone Diaries is going to take place’.

I think at some point as a writer you become aware that it doesn’t have to be New York. It doesn’t have to be Toronto. It doesn’t have to be Paris. It has to be in a certain part of the soul. If the heart is right, then you will get it right. But I’ve meandered! What was the original question? I completely forget …

CI: The idea of presenting what is normal in Canadian culture …

DB: The normal, yeah – I’m not interested in the normal, actually. I think if you look at the abnormal, or if you look at what is considered to be out of the norm, that tells you more about ‘the normal’.

CI: That’s what I’m trying to get at because that is what I found. As I read these characters, I was thinking about the distance that they might be from what is considered normal, and what that was really telling me about the normal.

DB: Most writers probably don’t go to the normal. I think that Updike did. He was one of my favourite writers when I was starting out. I devoured him because I wanted to see how to tell a story. I wanted to learn how to tell a story. I also liked how he combined sex and religion and ideas. I thought he did a really good job of that. Faith was a big part of his writing, which interested me. But he could take the norm and elevate it in some way, like with Rabbit Angstrom. He knew how to take Rabbit Angstrom, a very banal, basketball-loving fornicator, and lift him up in some way. His feet are on the ground, but his heart is striving for, but can’t find, the clouds. So I think that Updike did a great job of taking someone normal, and twisting him in a certain way to get a different angle.

As far as ‘normal’ goes, I’m not sure if most writers, or even readers, are interested in the normal. You want to get that refraction.

CI: I usually ask some version of this question because I am always interested in the impact of the arts on an individual artist, in this case an author of fiction. Are there certain musicians, painters, or maybe non-fiction writers that you have engaged in recent years that have had a measurable impact on your approach to writing?

DB: I am so embarrassed to answer this question! Embarrassed in the sense that I know I should say the Baroque – Bach! – you know, like Bellow would put on Mozart and blast it while he wrote his novels. I should say ‘well, I put on Bach, and I blast it!’

I can’t listen to music when I write. The greatest influences on my writing are other writers. I’ll read philosophy. I’ll read poetry. But mostly it’s been other novelists and short story writers. So I feel it’s going to be a disappointing answer …

CI: Out of curiosity, which philosophers have peaked your interest?

DB: Well, I started off with Kierkegaard. That started from a young age, and then I went back to Plato and Socrates. Kierkegaard has a narrative to his philosophy. He’s a storyteller. And Plato has the dramatic dialogues. There is something about them that I find accessible. I think because I am not rigorous enough to read – I mean, for my last novel, The Retreat, I read Heidegger - the whole idea of ‘the clearing’. Underneath the story of The Retreat, there is a lot of Heidegger peaking through.

CI: That’s interesting. When I saw the words ‘the clearing’, I wondered …

DB: Oh, definitely it’s there. I have a very elementary understanding of Heidegger, but I tried to get a sense. I read a lot of him. I read a lot of commentary on him. I tried to get the sense of how Heidegger saw the world. At one point a character says ‘you need to beat your way through the bush’ – and Heidegger uses that term - and find ‘the clearing’. I like to play with that. I’ll read that.

Kierkegaard played a big role in The Case of Lena S. In some ways the main character models the story of Kierkegaard’s life. There’s a parallel. If you know the life, you’ll understand the parallels, but I don’t make it overt. I play with that.

I would say that it’s more words that affect me than music. I listen to music. My son is into the Baroque right now. I hear that all the time. And I like the blues. I recall, when I was starting out as a writer, that I wondered if music would affect my writing. I wondered if I could listen to Eric Clapton, for example, and if that would influence my story, or if I could find the imaginative path to a story by listening to music. I tried it, and it didn’t work for me. I know that there are writers who find that works for them, but it didn’t work for me. I failed at finding that path. And visual art – I can appreciate it, but I don’t think that it either has a direct influence on my own writing.

CI: There is definitely, in most of the articles that I have read about your work, some mention of the erotic charge in your writing. As I read your work, I thought that it doesn’t necessarily always tap into the contemporary idea of ‘erotic’, but maybe it is more the ancient Greek sense of eros at play, more the degree of love between the different characters. In those moments where the physical contact between the characters means so much in your work, how difficult is it for you, how much work is involved, to get those moments of physical contact between the characters to work just right? I find those moments maybe the most unique parts of your writing, the way that physical contact can mean so much more than just simple romantic intentions.

DB: When I approach the emotional and the sexual in my characters, and how they bang up against each other, I am very conscious of understatement, of what isn’t said. There might be three words said, and then what wasn’t said? What question was not asked, let’s say by Lizzy when she was with Raymond on the golf course, or with Ada and her Vietnamese lover? And also the unknown, the sense that we believe that we know the other – I’m talking here in an eros sort of way, not just sexually. We could lead to that, but it’s the unknown, the misunderstanding and the misapprehension of the other - I want that to come through. We assume we know that person across from us at the breakfast table, but do we really? Do we even want to? Or do we even want the other to know us? How much do you want to reveal? What is honesty and what is brutality?

I’m very interested in relationships, not only between lovers but also between parents and children. Between children – in The Retreat Lizzy and her brother Everett, there is something sexual there that I wanted to reveal, but very underneath the surface, even more so from Everett’s point-of-view, that he’s watching. He’s watching, but he is very unaware of his own sexuality, of what he’s becoming. Does he like boys? Does he like girls? So that goes back to ‘the norm’. We seem to have this normal idea of what a relationship should look like. I think fiction allows you to explore those things in a very free way that non-fiction doesn’t, that talking doesn’t, that lecturing doesn’t. Novelists are probably lucky in the sense that they get to say things that other people don’t get to say. Everybody thinks that, but would never say it. I think, as a novelist, I get to say things and explore things that are maybe taboo. It’s interesting. I’m curious about it.

CI: I have come across a couple of times some mention of your upbringing, and a certain discomfort that your parents have with your writing. I wonder about the other side of that. As your children have got older, what is their level of engagement with your books? Do they read them? What feedback do you get?

DB: My eighteen-year-old son said the other day, ‘oh, I’ve got to read that book, because somebody was talking about it’. My children go from twenty-four down to sixteen, four of them. The boy who is studying philosophy – he’s twenty-one – has only read one novel, my first one - ‘Good job, Dad’. My other two sons who are younger have not read my novels. My daughter just started last year to read my work. I think that she was shy to go there, which makes perfect sense. Why would you want to go into your father’s head? There are more interesting things to do. You want to keep your father over here in some way. But now she reads it and she comes back to me and we talk about it. She’s curious about development of character, like ‘where did you find this, and why did Lizzy do this’? She gives me a very honest response to my writing. They’re very generous. They don’t have the judgment, let's say, that a father does for me. There’s no harshness there. And I think a measure of pride on their part, which is kind of fun.

Date of Interview: 02/14/2010
Location: The Nook, Wolseley, Winnipeg, MB
Link: www.uwinnipeg.ca