Prairie Storyteller: An Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe
Interview by Jeremy Mouat
Born and raised in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Guy Vanderhaeghe received his Bachelor of Arts degree, High Honours in History and Master of Arts in History at University of Saskatchewan. He later received his Bachelor of Education with great distinction at the University of Regina. Mr. Vanderhaeghe has been a recipient of a number of prestigious awards over his literary career. He resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and is currently a faculty member of Creative Writing at Saint Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. His latest novel, The Last Crossing was published in 2002.
Photo: Margaret Vanderhaeghe, courtesy of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Aurora: I'm only familiar with your books, The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing, and I was struck by similarities and differences in them. There seem to be lots of common themes, common contexts. Are these things you always engage in or were those two books a departure?
Vanderhaeghe: Actually, I did an MA in history and because I had studied history, I steered very much away from the historical novel. All of my other books would roughly be realistic contemporary fiction. One novel, My Present Age, is a black comedy. Homesick was basically a novel about a small town contemporaneous with when I was child and a kid. My first foray into historical fiction was a play called "Dancock's Dance" that was set in the flu epidemic of 1919. It was something I'd stumbled across in the archives. At that time, the Department of Public Health was under Public Works, and I discovered a Public Works report which noted that due to illness among staff, inmates of the North Battleford Insane Asylum had run the place during the flu epidemic. So I used that: I did research into psychiatric treatment but the rest of it was speculative, because there was virtually nothing in the records except this mention that, thanks to the patients, the North Battleford mental asylum weathered the 1919 flu epidemic. So I used that as a premise. I'd written one short story about Gabriel Dumont, who had ended up in Paris during the World Exposition there, looking for work with the equivalent of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.1 I always felt that because I had done an MA in history, I would be too inclined to steer to the facts of any sort of historical topic or theme that I was interested in. It was quite interesting reading your article on Morley Roberts. Back in 1975 I'd done a thesis on John Buchan. I can't even remember what the portentous title was. I think it was John Buchan, Imperialism, Conservativism, and Social Reconstruction. Or Conservativism, Imperialism and Social Reconstruction.2 I was looking at his biographies, his novels, his thrillers, and the fact that he was Governor General of Canada, etc., and talking about imperial and conservative ideas that were imbedded in the thriller form. . . . I was very leery about doing historical fiction and then I suppose that interest reasserted itself with age. Buchan said that as a young man he'd been interested in philosophy, and as an old man he was interested in history. So I guess that interest that I'd had in history reasserted itself. Because I'm a writer and because I studied history, I've always had an interest in the historical novel. That interest sometimes is distaste, sometimes it's an enormous source of pleasure for me.
Aurora: A friend of mine once gave a paper about Laura Ingalls Wilder's, Little House on the Prairie. She juxtaposed the famous novels and the equally famous television show based on those famous novels, with Laura Ingalls Wilder's life. Wilder's diaries reveal that her own life was the exact opposite of the accounts in the books. The family went bankrupt, they were driven off the farm, and so on. She was finally redeemed by these totally fictitious stories of pioneering in the west. It was a fascinating paper, and I asked my friend how she had come up with the idea of doing the research. She replied that as a teacher of western American history and western women's history, she found herself always shadowboxing with Laura Ingalls Wilder. All of her students came to class with images drawn from Little House on the Prairie. I thought of that in the context of The Englishman's Boy. You're talking about the mythic creation of the West with the account of the events that lead ultimately to the dispatch of the peaceful Canadian police force. Were you deliberately playing with that?
Vanderhaeghe: One of the interests that led me to write the novel first of all -- and this is going to sound very peculiar because I'm writing a historical novel - was that I thought I was writing a novel that was actually a warning against myth-making in any form. A kind of caveat about exactly those things that you're talking about with Laura Ingalls Wilder. And the fact that if you carry these imaginative constructs in your mind that are produced by television or the movies or novels or drama or anything else, you have to be very wary of them. Basically what anybody knows about Julius Caesar, or thinks they know about Julius Caesar, comes from Shakespeare's play.
Aurora: Great dramatist, lousy historian.
Vanderhaeghe: I think that's equally true all along the line. With mass media and mass entertainment, the power -- particularly with television and motion pictures and perhaps, even now, the internet -- the power of the image has become not only a psychologically controlling force in people's understanding of the world in the past, but it makes them retreat because of the power in that image. It makes them retreat from critical thinking about what they're consuming. In that novel, The Englishman's Boy, Chance says that if you're captivated by the image, there's nothing to do except accept or reject it as you receive it; you don't have time to think about it. There's nothing original in the novel; it's a dramatization in part about our understanding of the past and where we go from that understanding of the past towards the future. I knew something about the Cypress Hills Massacre, because I'd read Whoop-Up Country, when I was 10 or 11 years old.3 But the book, The Englishman's Boy, seemed about history, the real topic of the book was history. It was using one event, the Cypress Hills massacre, to talk about the way history is used politically. There's mention of Nazis and Fascists and Soviets, all things which are highly charged politically, but somehow manage to pass in many quarters as entertainment.
Aurora: There's an irony there too, though, isn't there, because this is an entertaining novel?
Vanderhaeghe: In many interviews, I've said that. That the novel is actually a warning against itself. One of the arguments that I keep on making about historical fiction is that the emphasis has to be and always should be on the noun and not the adjective: what people are reading is a novel. You could say fantasy novel, you could say realistic novel, all the adjectives attached to the word "novel", these may detract from the real truth, which is that what you're reading is an imaginative construct, highly subjective, often involving lies, or else filling in the lacunae in the story. One of the things I've always tried to do in my historical novels - well, I've only done it twice now -- is write something, or use as a departure point something about which the evidence may be contradictory or very little is known. Let's say you begin with a novel about Abraham Lincoln: there's not a lot of space for manoeuvre. And if you attempt to manoeuvre in the little space that there is, you have to fight with the mental construct that already exists. I read Gore Vidal's Aaron Burr, which I found captivating and convincing, mostly because I didn't know very much about Aaron Burr. Let's assume I was an Aaron Burr scholar. I would be arguing with the book all the time I read it. When I came to read his Abraham Lincoln, because I know something about Abraham Lincoln, I was arguing with Gore Vidal all the time that I read it. So if you take an incident like the Cypress Hills massacre, of which hardly anybody knows anything at all, and the written accounts of it are highly contradictory. It's been mythologized on both sides, native and white. But there's nothing approaching an answer to the Cypress Hills massacre.
Aurora: In the two quotations from Croce and Creighton that open the book, particularly the one by Croce, he seemed to be suggesting there's a science of history.
Vanderhaeghe: I'm not quite sure if that's my interpretation. I have to refresh myself. That's Croce's claim, of which I'm sceptical. "Historicism (the science of history) scientifically speaking, is the affirmation that life and reality are history and history alone." I think I'm saying with this novel is that there is no "scientifically speaking" about history. I guess I chose those two quotations as kind of an argument on the first page of the novel. These are two differing points of view about what history might be.
Aurora: But they both seem to affirm history's ability to speak to events, from the scientific approach, or from the narrative approach that Creighton was such an expert at.
Vanderhaeghe: I've always been very leery of post modernism, while accepting, with tightly circumscribed limits, the post modern argument about subjectivity. You have to recognize subjectivity, but to what extent do you give it leeway?
Aurora: How malleable are the discursive spaces?
Vanderhaeghe: Whatever; I've been sort of out of touch with academia since 1975. But it seems to me, like many doctrines or dogmas, post modernism was a useful reminder. But how far can you take that as an attitude towards either art or history or anything else?
Aurora: Like you, I'm cynical but also respectful. What I enjoy about post modernism is that to some extent it pushes me, and pushes others, to clarify one's own position, one's own understanding, and one's own authority - if indeed one has any at all -- to make truth claims, as post modernists would say. Is it possible to make these claims, and if so, why? The whole point of undercutting truth claims, as I understand the argument, is to argue against the possibility of a meta narrative that explains everything. It's a critique of the meta narrative that forces a liberal Enlightenment ideology on an inherently messy past, in which there's people being oppressed by other peoples in the name of this linear narrative where civilization is X and barbarity is Y.
Vanderhaeghe: That I accept. What I sometimes have difficulty with is the claim that history is just a narrative no different than a novel, which is sometimes posited to a certain degree. Both are subjective, both are creative acts of the imagination. But it seems to me that history is something in which you make an appeal to evidence and the record. That's kind of the foundation upon which all sorts of arguments can be postulated. But I know all kinds of novelists who will claim that a novel is every bit - talking about truth claims - is every bit as true as a historical narrative, and maybe more true. It seems to me that it's confusing things. I want to say that these are novels. Somebody else calls them historical novels. I'm not going to disclaim that, because they roughly fall into a genre that's been called the historical novel. But I always want people to know that they're not reading history, and I say that in interviews.
Aurora: Though in a way, if you're writing a novel about the Cypress Hills massacre, there is a level of ambiguity there, surely, in that claim?
Vanderhaeghe: But when you're talking about meta narratives and all the rest of it, it strikes me that that's what literature is about. It's in fact about ambiguity. I would argue that all novels eventually become historical. But if you're going to look to literature to explain the past, you read an old book not a new book. Because I also argue that the historical novel is almost invariably concerned with contemporary issues, and not issues that are very large in the mind of the past.
Aurora: Though presumably one could add a bracket "(insofar as we know)."
Vanderhaeghe: Exactly, insofar as we know. But the thing is that it's very hard for a person whose sensibility has been shaped by the present, to enter with any sympathy the perceptions of the past and write a successful novel. As you pointed out in your article about Roberts, racist assumptions were more than common; imagine trying to write a 19th century novel from that perspective, to be true to the mentality of the past.
Aurora: When you say that, I think of Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, which to some extent did try to do that.
Vanderhaeghe: But it's sort of half and half. I'm saying that the historical novel is an illusion, as all novels are an illusion. . . I think George Lukacs, talking about Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, said that the book is supposedly about the reconciliation between Norman and Saxon, and the creation of a new nation out of that. That struggle between the Norman and the Saxon is reconciled at the end of the novel, which is about - maybe - Scott's coming to terms with the United Kingdom in a sense, saying something new will come out of this between English and Scots. So even though the novel is set in Norman and Saxon times, in some way it's about the present, it reflects the consciousness of the present or the desire of the present or the hopes of the present.
Aurora: When I read The Englishman's Boy, having taught the history of the prairie west, I immediately began thinking of the way I could use it. Historians are notorious sponges, trying to come up with interesting assignments for their students, to force their students to think critically about mythic versions of the past. I can imagine an assignment that runs something like this: "Read this novel and now read an account of the creation of the Northwest Mounted Police in 1874, and assess the truthfulness of these two accounts." However much you may want to discount this, you will be cited as a far truer authority, precisely because you're speaking to modern sensibilities.
Vanderhaeghe: Exactly. And also because in many ways fiction or the movies are more viscerally persuasive. . . . The novel gives people the illusion of being present in the time, the way sometimes a movie does. You can really feel that you're there, the way the movie "The Birth of a Nation" made many white southerners feel very good about themselves. You can see the residue of that. I was just reading Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole, in which there's a woman in the Texas panhandle who's arguing that the Ku Klux Klan in the '20s weren't anything like they are now. She's an old woman. Now there's no mention of D.W. Griffith, but you get a sense that maybe this woman saw "Birth of a Nation" when she was 10 years old. So her conception is, "okay, the Ku Klux Klan was that then, and now it's something different." In some ways, when it comes to history, I think the historical novel or the historical film is for historians a bit like Gresham's Law. Bad pushing out good. In the sense that so many ideas are formed by the media. Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" has probably persuaded more people of a conspiracy around the death of John F. Kennedy than any number of books on the topic might have. Maybe. This is all speculative. I don't know, I'm making guesses.
Aurora: It's my sense that people don't like levels of ambiguity. The great thing about a novel or a historical film is there is no ambiguity, you're getting a linear narrative. This happens and then this happens, and you don't have to do a lot of the work to imagine what it was like to be there. "Ah, this is telling me what it was like to be there; now I know. It's as if I'm there." Whereas a more boring historical work might leave you with ambiguity. I've always played on this, and many of my colleagues have as well; we'll give students two completely opposing interpretations of an event. They want to know which one's right. "Which one's the right one?" they'll ask. I'll respond, "Well, the way you might figure that out is by looking at their sources and the way in which they're interpreting the sources, but as far as I can tell, their claims are equal. We have to talk about this." For at least a while, students don't like that anxiety. They want one account to be right, the other wrong. And I think that generally we like to have the thinking done for us, we like to have things conform to whatever preconceptions we have about the western past. Some colleagues of mine in the United States are a little tired of hackneyed assumptions about the western Canadian past, as a place full of really nice Mounties who look after everyone, where everyone's awfully polite, versus a completely anarchic scene of spoilage south of the border. They say, "Look, it's not that simple on our side and it surely can't be that simple on your side." For example, today, in the early 21st century, native people are marginalized in the United States, and Native people are marginalized in Canada. All you can argue is that the process was an orderly one in Canada. Or it wasn't. But I think as Canadians we want to make the connection with a peaceful, mythic, placid, decent west, it's feeding into an identity that we want to cling to. Which is why I was so fascinated by The Englishman's Boy, because to some extent it wants to pull the carpet out from under us.
Vanderhaeghe: The difference between the Canadian and American west was not really one of kind, but of degree. Some of the main impulses were very much the same, there were just mitigating factors like the Hudson's Bay Company settlement, basically fewer white people, which make a difference.
Aurora: The Englishman's Boy was not only a wonderful novel, it was also a very successful novel and won the Governor General's Award. Is The Last Crossing a sequel? What's the relationship of the two novels?
Vanderhaeghe: I want to write roughly a trilogy about the
1870s in western Canada. And so The Last Crossing 
was in part thinking about the imperial adventurer figure. In the same
way, in your article, you were describing the British gentlemen who went all
over the world and there were plenty of them who tramped across Western Canada.
The beginning of the novel is the idea of the British adventurer in the West,
and everything else is an add-on. I really don't have much of a plan when I
write. I almost always start with a character, and then imagine situations for
the character or the characters.
Aurora: There are three British adventurers.
Vanderhaeghe: Yeah, originally I thought there would be one. Originally I thought of a pre-Raphaelite painter, of which, as far as I'm aware, there's no record of. You had your Paul Kane, but I had in mind a particular sort of British aesthete. That was the beginning of The Last Crossing as a novel.
Aurora: In terms of The Englishman's Boy, was the idea of a trilogy already present?
Vanderhaeghe: No. When I started The Last Crossing, I just had this idea that I wanted to explore. It always seems to me that whatever I'm working on, I have another idea that I would rather be working on than what I'm working on now. I think I almost manufacture them. So the idea, or at least the beginning of the idea of a trilogy, of a third novel, surfaced at that point. But it's already changed. Originally the idea of the third novel would be kind of a political novel, in the sense that it would be dealing with the relationship between the police in Western Canada and government in Ottawa.
Aurora: So Custis Straw and Lucy come in as other narrative voices because you hear those voices and they have to get included?
Vanderhaeghe: I hear those voices. In some ways, the difference between writing a novel and if I were to imagine myself attempting to write a history, the difference for me is that the novel has always been character driven. There's very little plan when I begin a novel. There's sometimes not even any real sense of where the characters might take me. So people like Custis and Lucy weren't planned for but they might almost take over a novel.
Aurora: On one level, The Last Crossing becomes a novel about Lucy's own quest.
Vanderhaeghe: Yeah, all those things happen. So that Custis, who might have been originally planned as a very minor figure, actually becomes a dominating figure in the book, at least in my mind. I know this sounds all very confusing; I think writers are very bad about talking about their work, and even explaining why they might decide to do something or what prompted them to do something.
Aurora: That reluctance might be almost like not wanting to talk about a shut-out when you're a goalie. . . ?
Vanderhaeghe: There may be an element of that. But I think you're never even sure where things come from, in terms of characters or the happy accidents, the things that you never planned for and then suddenly an idea strikes you and takes you in an entirely different direction. What we're dealing with is very vague and amorphous and malleable. And, at least in my case, the more I try to set it in whatever original plan I might have, it becomes dead. Right now I'm saying I'm considering doing a trilogy. But I never may get around to writing the third novel. I've written a couple of chapters, and I've stopped now to write short stories. Just because I feel like writing short stories. In researching a book, half the time the stuff I research that I think I need, I never use in a novel.
Aurora: Certainly as a historian, I always start a research project knowing exactly what I'm doing and yet I never end up doing that. The story you're interested in, or the theme, is in fact not the significant one. You begin to realize that you're creating a story that's bending the sources out of shape; the story the sources is telling you is going in a completely different direction. At a certain point you have to give up and say, "okay, to hell with it, that's the story I'm going to write."
Vanderhaeghe: I think that's probably even a little bit more marked in fiction, that tendency. That tendency exists in all writing. My guess is it becomes even more marked in fiction, the kind of uncontrollability of the material.
Aurora: Characters out of control.
Vanderhaeghe: Characters out of control, even ways of writing. I would say 250 pages of The Last Crossing was written in the third person, until I decided to go back and start writing it, at least a good deal of it, in the first person, in varying voices. Because it just didn't feel right. If I had to articulate to anyone why I did that, the only thing I can say is that it just didn't feel right. It felt lifeless, that it needed some other approach.
Aurora: I found the similarities in both novels quite striking, quite apart from the place and the time period. People move north from Ft. Benton into this area where things aren't defined. The things not being defined are the relationships between people, the relationships between individuals, there're these unanswered questions. Those similarities struck me even though they're very different novels. I thought, "oh, this guy's interested in the same thing in both these novels." Did you have a sense of that?
Vanderhaeghe: Oh I think so. One of the things that interests me is becoming. It's this kind of inchoate region; for a brief moment in time there's no duly constituted legal authority. Nobody's quite sure where the border is. They think it's the Milk River. In some ways, nationality may be important to Americans to a certain degree, but people pass back and forth across the border without any hindrance. I read that you could pay your taxes in Ft. Benton with Canadian currency. It seems to me like a moment of possibility which could go in almost any direction. There's a possibility that this part of the world may become American, or it may stay British. There's a possibility for wholesale bloodshed, if all the factors fall into place. It's almost as if it's a moment in this part of Canada, just before God says, "let there be light". It's really kind of vague, it's really sort of free form. It's in a way unbounded.
Aurora: And that creates, to use the post modern expression, the discursive space: "Ok, I can take anything into this."
Vanderhaeghe: Right. So there's the question, which is becoming popular in literature, the idea of borders, political borders, borders of ethnicity, race, all the rest of it. This is kind of a borderless region. Also as a practical working novelist, the less that there's on the record, the discursive space opens up more and more for someone like me.
Aurora: There's a famous comment made by Robert Kroetsch about the stories making us real. I wanted to ask a question about place and your interest in the ambiguities of this inchoate area of Western Canada. Do you have a social role creating a fiction and a culture that allows for a more sophisticated interrogation? This is almost a pompous question.
Vanderhaeghe: In the beginning, when I first started writing, I made a conscious choice to stay here. That is, in the west, and particularly in Saskatchewan. There was a moment in Saskatchewan writing, if you can limit that closely, beginning with the first publication of a literary magazine, I think it was in 1972, there was a moment when there was a strong feeling that there was a necessity to tell our stories. It's quite interesting; Kroetsch taught here in the early days of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and things like that. There was a feeling, not of obligation, or maybe a bit of obligation, that the place needed to be written, in the Kroetschian sense. And that until it was written, we couldn't begin to understand ourselves. We had a handful of texts, by W.O. Mitchell and Sinclair Ross, those were the central texts. But we also realized that, inasmuch as we may have revered those texts, that this was a different place than it was when those books were written. So almost consciously, my first work was quasi urban. I tried to leave, aside from in a descriptive sense, the land out of it. Any sort of mystical W.O. Mitchell/Sinclair Ross attitudes towards the landscape. But at the simplest level I think it's just a case of writing what you knew. For a long time, a lot of us thought that what we knew wasn't important enough to write about, and that you had to get out and get to a more important place that you could write about.
Aurora: Aretha Van Herk tells the story of reading The Studhorse Man when she was living in Edmonton and looking out the window and seeing the High Level Bridge and thinking, "That's in this novel I'm reading; you can do it, you can write about this place."
Vanderhaeghe: I think that was just starting with figures like Weibe and Kroetsch. Probably Wiebe was a big influence on me in a different way after I read The Temptations of Big Bear. My take is radically different than Wiebe's take. For writers of my generation, we needed to see people who were staying here and were writing about the place. That was basically in Alberta, that was Wiebe and Kroetsch. Kroetsch had spent years and years in the States. It was kind of like a counterpart, ten or fifteen years later, to the Canadian literary nationalism that was going on in the late '60s and into the '70s. Not ten or fifteen years, maybe ten years at the most. The kind of idea that we could do it and we should do it.
Aurora: And it was important to be doing it on the banks of this river as opposed to, say, Toronto?
Vanderhaeghe: Yeah. I've got to an age where I don't hold as strenuously to that anymore, in the sense that I don't think I need to inhabit this landscape anymore. But I spent a year and a half in Ottawa in my early 30s. I felt if I didn't get back here I'd never write another thing.
Aurora: So the muse is here.
Vanderhaeghe: Well it used to be here. I'm not sure if it is anymore. I'm a product of this place. I was born here, I was raised here, I've lived my entire life here, with very brief stints someplace else. In some ways I would argue that it's more my place in that sense that it was ever Mitchell's or even Ross's. Because they moved on, which doesn't mean they're not entitled to write about it. I'm just saying, I've been here my entire life. Which doesn't mean that tomorrow I might not pick up and go someplace else. But I've thought and still think that it's important that art of all kinds needs to be made everywhere. By that I mean, that in a country like ours, it's important that there be no controlling literary narrative in this country. That it should not be Toronto centric, it might've been in the old days Montreal centric, even for English writers.
Aurora: I couldn't agree more. I was talking earlier today with a colleague, we were both agreeing that what makes Canada such an interesting place is that we're not frozen. We were thinking of the United States, which to some extent doesn't allow many conversations about states rights versus the role of the federal government. In Canada we've been used to at least arguing, at one level or another, about the separation of Quebec, of renegotiating in some fundamental ways relationships with native peoples, whether it's in the north or in British Columbia. It seems we can't have the American certainty, "well, it's in the constitution, this is how it goes." In Canada we have to make a space for a hundred different voices, we're constantly renegotiating relationships with each other. It would really be the kiss of death if there was a monolithic voice, whether it be a cultural establishment based on the Harbourfront, or anywhere else. It's fundamental to who we are to have as many voices as possible.
Vanderhaeghe: I have this feeling that some of the validity of an assertion about a place, you've got to be on the ground to make an assertion. Now I don't know this, because I've never lived there, but I suspect that in many ways Faulkner's assertion about the South, or Flannery O'Connor's assertion about the South, are in some ways more valid than Truman Capote's assertion about the South. Because Truman Capote cleared out of there when he was 17 years old and went to New York. Which is not to say that Truman Capote wasn't a good writer. I'm just saying that sometimes you have to vote with your feet and I guess I kind of voted with my feet by staying here. I had a feeling that as a writer this is where I belonged. And that as a writer these are my stories and this is what I was going to write about.
Aurora: You seemed to be hinting at the beginning of our talk, that you're almost prepared to accept Buchan's analysis, "well, I'm older now, I'm interested in history". It's interesting situating stories in a period in which there's so much ambiguity, allowing you the freedom to go in all these different directions. But it also seems to me, however much ambiguity and irony there is in both your novels, they do seem to be returning, because of the ambiguity of that time, to establishing narratives that speak to creation stories.
Vanderhaeghe: I think that that's true. If they're not creation stories, they're pre-creation stories. They're hovering at an important moment in time, that they're on a crux of decision. Even though the characters aren't making the decisions. . . If the Assiniboines don't get killed in Cypress Hills at this moment in time, how long before the Northwest Mounted Police? Who knows? They'd been talking about the formation of the Northwest Mounted Police maybe three to four years before the massacre. But they may have been still talking about it in 1880. Or it may never have been formed, or it may have been formed in some other sort of constitution. McDonald always talked about the model of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. All I'm saying is that in some way, the way we are in Western Canada now, relates to that small skirmish on the margins of a place that nobody had ever heard of at that moment, in Washington or London or Ottawa. Couldn't have found it on the map. If the personalities had been slightly different, it may never have happened, etc, etc. It's the human element in history that largely intrigues me. It's the Creighton element, and it's one of the reasons why I didn't become a historian. Chiefly and fundamentally, I was more interested in personal histories of human beings and looking at them in a way which fiction would allow me to do with a cleaner conscience than writing history.
Aurora: When I read The Englishman's Boy, I thought, here's this interesting novel that's juxtaposing the Hollywood western against Shorty's story. And then we come to the Cypress Hills massacre. It seemed to me almost that it could've been part of a western, there was a different element to the description of that fighting that came close to being what you were de-constructing at another level. It's a narrative account of a battle. And maybe that unlocks in my mind a certain way of seeing it. It began to remind me of a western as opposed to the effort to unpack the western, throughout the rest of the novel.
Vanderhaeghe: Yeah. To a certain extent I was trying to unpack the western. But in other ways I wasn't departing very far from - whatever word you want to use - the archetypes or clichés of the western. In some ways they can't be dispensed with.
Aurora: You're always going to be shadow boxing with them.
Vanderhaeghe: Yeah. And the thing is too, all you can do is modify them and have a critical eye toward some aspects. I would be the last person to claim that I wasn't also seduced by it at times, either consciously or unconsciously. I have to be interested in the western to be writing a book about the western. Unless you have a certain affection for something, you're not going to spend as much time as I did working with it or working around it. You have to like it to spend that much time with it.
Interview conducted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, May 2003
Notes
1. Gabriel Dumont was a leader of the Métis during the 1885 Northwest Rebellion. For a brief biography, see the online entry from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=40814.
2. There is a brief online biography of John Buchan - later Lord Tweedsmuir -
at:
http://www.online-literature.com/john-buchan/
A copy of
Guy Vanderhaeghe's MA thesis, "John Buchan: Conservatism, Imperialism, and
Social Reconstruction," is held by the University of Saskatchewan Library.
3. For scholarly descriptions of the Cypress Hills Massacre, see Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 129-35, or Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 30-33 (both available at the Athabasca University Library). Collections Canada has included a British government confidential report on the Cypress Hills Massacre online, at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/05/0529/052920/05292019_e.html
For a brief online description of Fort Whoop-Up, see:
http://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng.aspx?id=34
The Last Crossing, McClelland & Stewart, 2002.
The Englishman's Boy. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Things as They Are? Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1992.
Homesick. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
My Present Age. Toronto : Macmillan of Canada, 1984.
The Trouble with Heroes. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1983.
Man Descending.Toronto Macmillan of Canada, 1982
Plays
Dancock's Dance. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishers, 1995.
Englishman's Boy, Governor General's Literary Awards for Fiction, 1996 and Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction/Best Book of the Year.
Man Descending (collection of short stories), 1982 Governor General's Literary Awards, Canada, Faber Prize, UK.
Homesick, co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Awards, 1990.
I had a Job I Liked. Once. Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama, 1993.
Jeremy Mouat's past position was professor of History with the Centre for Global and Social Analysis at Athabasca University. He has since moved on, and is now working at Augustana University, Alberta. Send him an email if you have any questions about this article.
Guy Vanderhaeghe's novel, A Good Man, McClelland & Stewart (2011) was listed as a National Bestseller and long listed for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Since this articled was published, he has been the recipient of the 2013 Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts and winner, Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction Globe and Mail 100 — 2015 (Daddy Lenin and Other Stories, Penguin Random House).
Updated March 2018
Aurora Online
Citation Format
Mouat, Jeremy (2003) "Prairie Storyteller: An Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe." Aurora Online