Autobiographical Notes for Turning Points Conference     (2002)

I am a third-generation Jewish Anglophone Montrealer. In other words, a minority (Jewish among Christians) of a minority (English among French) among a minority (Quebec within Canada). This sense of being an outsider seems to be typical of most people who become writers; writers tend to be observers rather than participants, and are aware of a certain detachment even in the thick of things. Nobody in my extended family was – or is – interested in literature; no one is even a serious reader. But everyone loves to talk and to tell jokes and stories, and maybe that general chattiness had an influence on my work. I was an insatiable reader as a child (and I still am; no one has ever become a good writer without being a dedicated reader). I think that the fact I had such a big loud emotional familydrove me to read more just for privacy!

            Reading is one kind of travelling, of course, and the best way of travelling through time. But nothing beats actual physical experience of the world for a sense of place and of the differences in society and culture that go with it. I left Montreal at seventeen to go to university in Boston, in Greece, and then in England, doing a lot of travelling as well across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. And that’s another typical writerly path, I have found: we tend to be extremely curious about the world, and therefore avid travellers.

            I think it is very helpful for young writers to see a bit of the world so they don’t get too complacent about their values or their interpretations of things. I know that my writing was strongly influenced by Greek literature, which I never would have read had I not spent ten months studying archaeology and art in Athens. Like everyone else, I’d done a lot of creative writing as a child, but poetry first became a serious vocation when was introduced to Modern Greek poetry (Seferis, Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, Sikelyanos, and so on). These writers seemed less preoccupied with formalism and more politically and emotionally engaged than the Modern English and American poets I was familiar with. Their work opened new doors for me and started to close the gap between what I wrote in my private journal and the rather precious myth-and-metaphor laden poems I’d been working on in creative writing workshops.

            SO: what drew me to writing in the beginning was

            1) a sense of being an outsider

            2) a love of oral language: jokes, stories, and conversation

            3) a love of books

            3) curiosity about the world

            4) travel

            Another big influence on my career was the American poet Denise Levertov, whom I met back in Boston after I came back from Greece. I took a poetry workshop with her and she became my mentor, and later my friend. Besides having the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, she also had one of the fiercest consciences of anybody I’ve ever met. Her example taught me that being a poet didn’t mean you had to cower in your garret, or even lurk in an ivory tower. You could be out there, actively, in the world, and your poetry could speak to any issue that moved you. My first book, Complicity, published in 1983, was dedicated to her. It was more explicitly political than any I’ve written since, but I think my definition of what constitutes a “political” issue has broadened since those early days. Nonetheless, that title sums up an important theme in all my work: individual responsibility and communal affiliation.

            After changing my major every five minutes, I finally decided I wanted to study English literature and went, for that purpose, to Oxford (it being about the most “English” place I could think of). Subsequently I worked at publishing house in London and then at another in Toronto. I got my Ph.D. in 1983, the same year as I published my first book of poems; by then I was teaching English at U. of T. where I worked, off and on, for many years.

            My second book, The Power to Move, was published in 1986; it can best be described as poems of love and travel, and of love as a journey. Several of the poems in it were written during the time my husband and I lived in Mexico. Henry Moore’s Sheep and Other Poems was published in 1990. The long title poem is feminist, satirical art criticism, and other poems in the book tackle the experience of growing up female. My fourth collection, about the female body in sickness, health, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, entitled Hide & Seek, came out in 1995, a year after the birth of my second child. The best poems from these four titles, as well as about twenty new pieces, were included in Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems, published in 2004. I’ve also written a couple of unpublished books of kids’ poems.

            In 1998, a book of essays, The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and won two major awards: the Gabrielle Roy prize for the best book of English-Canadian literary criticism, and the Raymond Klibansky, for the best work in the Humanities. This book was the fruit of a research fellowship I held at the University of Toronto for many years. Ironically, I won the prizes after my teaching career had ended! But writing a long work in prose gave me the confidence to undertake my first novel, The Violin Lover (Goose Lane Editions, 2006),which was set in London between the wars in a community of classical musicians, and hence required a lot of research itself. So, although I’ve gone back and forth between academic and creative writing the collaboration has always been a fruitful one. I did almost as much research for The Violin Lover and for my second work of fiction, Esther, Star of the Sea (set in 1738) as for my scholarly book; it just came out in a different form.

            If there’s anything I have to teach you, then, it is probably that writing doesn’t come from nowhere – it comes out of a lifetime of learning. You can learn many ways: from books, and art, and all the things people make; from your family, friends, and people you encounter, from travel to different countries, from doing different jobs. But you have to pay attention. I often find that young writers think they have to be “original” and believe that they will be inspired without working hard at their craft; that they shouldn’t read too much or they will be influenced by other people’s books. This is the single biggest mistake you can make.

Opening Talk for Vancouver Jewish Book Fair

November 20, 2006

            I am just delighted to be back in Vancouver. When I read at the Jewish Book Fair here two years ago, I was promoting my most recent book of poetry, Running in Prospect Cemetery, but I managed to squeeze in a short excerpt from my then unpublished novel, The Violin Lover also. As the title suggests, The Violin Lover is story about music and its effect on people’s lives. So my profound gratitude goes to Macey Cadesky and Agnes Klinghofer for their beautiful performances so far—you will hear more later—and of course also to Reisa Schneider, the extremely dedicated organizer of this festival, and her staff, for making a shidach between music and words tonight.

The story that sparked The Violin Lover was told to me, over tea of course, by elderly relatives in London, England in the spring of 1997, almost ten years ago. My cousins Anna and Harold mentioned, in passing, a relative of whom I’d never heard: one of their uncles, a man who would have been my great-great uncle: that is, the younger brother of my mother’s grandmother (Are you listening? There’s going to be a test after the reading). Anyhow, this fellow, whose name was Sam, had been a shanda and a harpa – in fact, he was such a major disgrace that none of my relatives back home in Montreal had even heard of him!

 I don’t really want to tell you what he did that was such a disgrace, because that might ruin the book for you! For the same reason I have to warn you not to read the Afterword first like some of my friends did, because that will also spoil the plot. (I thought when I called it an After Word, people would read the words AFTER the rest of the book, but apparently a lot of folk go there first.) But anyhow, the main thing was that poor disgraced Sam had been erased from the family archives for his sins, and I thought that was wrong. No one should be totally forgotten, as though they never had existed, no matter what they did or who they offended. So when I couldn’t stop thinking about the little bit I knew about my black sheep uncle, I decided that it was my job to give him back his history, even if most of it was invented. After all what did I have to go on? A couple of photographs, some childhood memories from my oldest relatives, a sheet of music. Gossip. And misinformation.

For example, the events narrated in my book take place from the fall of 1934 to the spring of 1936, in London and then, briefly, in Vienna and rural Austria. Now everyone knows that Austria in 1936 wasn’t a very good place for the Jews, so naturally I interpreted Uncle Sam’s going there as self-destructive behaviour, and developed my depiction of the character based on him accordingly. So imagine my chagrin when, after I’d already finished the first draft of my book, I found evidence that he’d actually gone to Austria ten years earlier: that is, in 1926. PreHitler. Obviously, going to Austria in 1926 did not mean the same thing as going there in 1936.

Of course, by the time I got this evidence, it was too late to use it.  By then, long lost Great Great uncle Sam Nagley had been transformed into Ned Abraham, a character with his own complex history and motivations.  And that’s when I realized that what I had written was entirely fiction, no matter how many details were borrowed from family history. That Ned, like my Great Great Uncle Sam, was a doctor and a violinist, a bachelor and a womanizer, that he grew up in Leeds, that his father had been an anarchist and that he still lived with his mother as a grown man—these tidbits were suggestive, certainly; they were what I based my character on. But how close my character Ned is to the real man Sam is impossible to say. The people in my novel frequently reflect about how little they know each other. How much more difficult it is to interpret people from the past; people one has never even met.

Our obsession with history is one of the main things The Violin Lover is about.  When I was first sending it around to agents and publishers, I got some reactions that really mystified me. For example, a couple of editors declared, point blank: “we don’t publish historical fiction”.  I find this peculiar, because the traditional storytelling voice is the past tense – “Once upon a time there was a princess who lived in a castle”, etcetera. To rule out historical fiction on principal seems, therefore, to be a very short-sighted policy for any press to have. But I guess what they want is stuff about contemporary society. And of course, that’s their privilege.

A slightly different response was the one I got from an agent, supposedly an experienced editor and lover of books, who complained that I kept talking about dead people, and that readers wouldn’t be interested in them. Now, this reaction really surprised me, because I thought it was clear that a major theme of the book is the way in which our family backgrounds influence our lives. In The Violin Lover, over and over again, the characters believe they’re acting freely and consciously, but every action bears the huge weight of the past. People are only partly aware of their own motivation and what forces compel them to do the things they do. They don’t really know all the ingredients of their physical and emotional DNA, though they try very hard to remember and to understand. All those “dead people” I insisted on writing about shaped my characters, so my characters think about them and remember them often.

Remember the saying, “Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it”?  Unfortunately, only time gives us enough distance to see the patterns we are caught up in. And then we tend to see patterns everywhere; so many patterns, sometimes, that we start to question if we have any free will at all! In The Violin Lover, I play around with certain key patterns or motifs: for instance, empires flourishing and being lost, buildings burning down, bridges being built and demolished, water turning to ice and snow, men disappearing, war and exile. But as the water/ ice/ snow metaphors suggest, although there is perpetual transformation, some essential identity survives; we are all each other in new forms.

The patterns in our lives result from the necessary tension between freedom and destiny, between difference and identity. And in this regard, they are like the patterns in music which may modulate from major to minor, speed up or slow down, invert themselves: patterns which make it possible to be creative without chaos. Music is the universal language and, as such, another way of describing how human similarities prevail through translation and over time. Especially for the characters in The Violin Lover, who, as Jews and recent immigrants from Russia, feel themselves outsiders in English society, music is a force that both empowers them and joins them to others. 

At this point I’d like to read you the first six pages of the novel, in which we see the power music has over the main character, Ned Abraham, the violin lover. Remember that we’re in London, England in the autumn of 1934. The story starts with Ned walking along the Thames after a concert. (read first 6 pages of book—then Bach partitas—then scene of Ned and Jacob, then Mozart duets, then question and answer period)