André Narbonne is the author of the new novel Those Are Pearls. His other books include the novel Lucien & Olivia. He teaches at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.
Q: How much was your new novel based on your own family history?
A: Those Are Pearls began as a series of emails to my mother. I asked her about her history growing up during the Great Depression and decided to distill that information into a short work of fiction that I would present to her.
The story “Margaret’s Great Depression” turned out to be the second chapter of a novel I did not yet know that I was writing. The work is almost entirely true.
In fact, at the end, I quote one of my mother’s emails verbatim:
Just before my mother died, I told her how lucky we were to admire rather than fear a storm, and I recalled our wait in the old Ford. I didn’t think my mother ever lied to me. She was hard at times, but I thought she would never lie. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I was afraid.”
I didn’t think I could say it better, and I wanted the voice of the story to sound like hers.
Contrast that with the anecdote about the tart that dirties her pinafore, which is an invention. She told me about how she’d gone to see her grandmother, hopeful that everything she’d heard about loving and fun grandmothers would be true of hers, and later learned she was forbidden to visit again because she was too dirty.
When I sent my mother the finished story, she replied that her mother would never have wasted money on tarts. That led to a long discussion about the demands of narrative. “If I’m going to write this as a truthful fiction,” I told her, “you’ll have to put up with my lies.” She agreed and what followed was a compromise between history and fiction.
Here’s why I invented the tart: when first drafting the story, I was concerned that it lacked the sense of immediacy one gets from the ephemeral. I asked her what smell she most associated with Winnipeg in the 1930s, which is why the story opens with
Winnipeg is the Honeysuckle Bakery on the north side of Notre Dame. It’s the last years of the Depression and the smell of baked bread, doughnuts fills my childhood.
And that’s also why I invented the tart that leads to her ostracization. It was an invisible stitch.
At some point during our correspondence, my mother forwarded an email from my great-uncle Harry Short Jr, who’d passed not long after writing.
I include some of his email below:
My mother fell down the stairs while she was at boarding school. Fearing repercussion from her father, the head mistress kept it from her father until it was too late.to set her back in place. She was fitted with a very uncomfortable girdle but the curvature could not be corrected and she was left with a permanent hump in her back. She was not able to get rid of the girdle until she married and at that time she vowed never to wear it again. Her husband fell at work and hurt his head and had to move to a cold climate. Mom said he had a tropical disease and at first they tried to medicate it with hot spices but soon told him he would have to move to a colder climate and at the time the coldest English settlement was in Winnipeg. Margaret's parents didn't want her to move. Her husband was too proud to ask for help. They sailed for Canada in 1910.
After I received this and another email he’d written, I decided to write a multi-generational novel. Because the majority of the book would now be about people long deceased, it would necessarily side with fiction, with narrative flow—invisible stitches—over fact.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I wanted to get it right. My research included reading death certificates, baptismal records, wedding licenses etc.
Harry Sr. fights in Jameson’s Raid, the misguided “excursion” that led to the Boer War. He was captured and ransomed back to the English. My research included reading the court transcripts from Jameson’s trial. I consulted the state environmental agency in South Africa about weather patterns and clouds, looked through 19th-C photographs of Cape Town and wrote Harry Sr. into the pictures.
To accurately describe the arrival of the family in Manitoba, I emailed the Winnipeg Railroad Museum and asked where they would arrive in 1910 and what would have been visible from the train.
What surprised me was how helpful everyone was. Almost all of my emails were answered.
Q: Can you say more about how you balanced fiction and history, especially as a family member, as you wrote the book?
A: So, I think I probably answered this above, but I’ll speak to the philosophical aspect of “getting it right.”
I wanted to avoid what I see as the pitfalls of presentism. I didn’t want my four protagonists to be heroically like us while their antagonists behave like they belong with a vengeance to their historical era. I clothed them all—protagonists and antagonists—in a world that existed in history without being dishonest in the way of, say, Dances with Wolves.
A more honest movie on a similar theme that came out around the same time is Black Robe. My ancestors went through astonishing calamities without losing their religion. I lost mine reading the papers and watching the news. I wanted to treat their beliefs with respect, not turn them into ahistorical cut-ups whose political sensibilities are informed by the Summer of Love—my complaint about Dances with Wolves.
What they share with this generation is that their beliefs are complicated. Not just characters in conflict, they are conflicted characters in conflict. My hope is that other members of my family who read Those Are Pearls see integrity in my fictions even if our adjectives differ.
Q: The novel took you about 25 years to complete--what was your writing process like?
A: As a rule, I don’t go to a blank computer screen looking for inspiration. I’m a plotter. I walk around with things before I write.
Once I understood that the novel would be primarily about four people I decided on a framework. The principle of construction was that of Matryoshka dolls. One character would be the inner doll that you arrive at last, but because it was a novel, not something constructed and tactile, the outside frames would be akin to the inner dolls. Perhaps none of this makes sense visually, but it’s how I imagined the overall story.
For about 20 years, my mother’s story was the inner doll/outer frame. Then Harry, Nan, and Frank in that order. I would write complete chapters that had their own dramatic arc. When writing a chapter, I generally completed the first draft quickly, spending more time on revisions. I wouldn’t walk from the work until I was content that the chapter was complete—fit to print.
When I did leave, I might leave for a very long time. During the course of writing Those Are Pearls I completed a Ph.D. dissertation, published a poetry and a short story collection, and a novel. I also published numerous articles on Canadian literature while raising four children. I could be gone from the manuscript for very long periods – maybe even a year.
I always knew that I would finish it. The characters kept me coming back. I also had solid encouragement. Alistair MacLeod read the first five chapters before writing the letter that helped me get my present job. Terry Griggs when she was writer-in-residence at UWindsor was very supportive, as was my writing group.
Perhaps more importantly, my family were onboard. They liked what they read. Some of the chapters I published in Nashwaak Review, Carte Blanche, The Prairie Journal, The Windsor Review. All of this encouraged me to return to the manuscript, and when I did, I was always happy to go back to that world in which my characters lived.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m currently working on The Selected Criticism of Archibald MacMechan. It’s another of my 25-year projects.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’ve completed a second collection of short stories, which I’m “pearling” for publication.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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