Some Great Thing (30 page)

Several threads run through this novel: the world of the media, the English-French language issue in Quebec, the history of Black Canadians, and particularly black railroad porters, in the province. Were all of these in your mind from the outset, or did some weave their way in as you wrote?

I wanted to write a novel about a black journalist who begins to discover himself and his own cultural interests, history and identity, as a byproduct of covering a political and social contest pitting English- and French-speaking Canadians against one another. So, yes, I had these various threads in mind from the beginning, but I had no idea how I would weave them all together. I just had to jump in and start writing, and I chose to do so without spending too much time plotting out the novel, which might have run the risk of choking off spontaneous, energetic writing. The first draft came out messy and
unorganized, but at least it appeared to be a living, breathing, animated beast.

Judge Melvyn Hill is a particularly fascinating character—a black man who has worked hard and risen to a respected position, but who is unhappy in his personal life and often shows bad judgment in his professional life. Why did you mould him as such a sad and conflicted personality?

Conflicted personalities are interesting to observe, and to write about. Melvyn Hill strives to create a world for himself in which he can operate with dignity, but his obsession with success makes him intolerant and judgmental. Still, he is alienated and lonely and I wanted the reader to care about him and feel for him, despite his failings.

Paul Quarrington described your book as “filled with wonderful people.”Who is your favourite character in the novel, and why?

If I had thought to put Paul in the book, he would probably have become my first choice. But my favourite character in
Some Great Thing
is Yoyo, for his complete astonishment at the silly, inexplicable ways that we live in rich, developed nations. I like the way his being a foreign visitor to Manitoba offers the reader a fresh lens through which to see Canada and its foibles.

As well as offering a large cast of characters,
Some Great Thing
has lots going on. Can you share some insight into your writing process for a novel with a number of subplots?

I was worried that I would never finish it—or if I did, that I’d never make it interesting—if I wrote the novel with the same painstaking technique that I had used to draft short stories (some of which I thought were stilted and lifeless). I decided to loosen up and just “let it rip,” without stopping to think about writing. There’s a moment early in the novel when the older, jaded reporter, Eddy, advises Mahatma to stop thinking and just write in order to finish a news story before the deadline. I tried to do that. To not think too much, or intellectualize the process, but just to get comfortable, write quickly and let it all boil up wildly on first draft. So that’s what I did. Later, I rewrote madly, chopping out more than half of an energetic but unwieldy six-hundred-page draft.

Some Great Thing
is filled with dark humour. Did you set out to write comedy, or did the characters and situations draw this out?

I did not set out to write comedy, but I did want the story to be lively and engaging. It seemed that the more and the faster I wrote, the more humorous it became. It was a natural development. The very process of writing brought the humour out of me, and encouraged me to throw it down on the page.

Do you think your novel could have been set in the United States, or do you feel that it’s purely Canadian in its way of exploring racial, cultural and linguistic friction?

The first time I sent the novel in draft form to a prospective agent, I was turned down and encouraged to consider setting the story in a more interesting place than Winnipeg. The argument went that if I set it in Toronto or New York, it would no longer be seen as a regional novel. To me, this was hokum. It suggested that a novel is “regional” if it is set in Winnipeg, but of global, universal reach if it is set in a big metropolis. But Winnipeg is pretty well the only city in Canada where this novel could unfold. The novel gives Winnipeg a communist mayor in the 1980s. What Canadian city, other than Winnipeg, could have had a communist mayor at that time? And the particular French-English conflict that provides the socio-political backdrop for Mahatma Grafton’s growth on the job could only have taken place in Manitoba.

I do not like to think of
Some Great Thing
as a regional novel. I prefer to think of it as a novel set in a specific time and place—Winnipeg, in the 1980s, during a crisis over the constitutional rights of French Canadians in English Canada—that will, if it works successfully as fiction, appeal to a wide swath of readers. I love novels that are anchored in specific times and situations. This doesn’t make them regional. It makes them real.

by Lawrence Hill

The prospect of writing my first novel terrified me. Surely I wasn’t sufficiently brilliant to write a novel. And I certainly wasn’t knowledgeable about all earthly matters. How would I envisage such a big project, or get every line just right? Eventually I would learn to narrow my focus, limit my anxieties, and just relax and let loose with the writing, page by page. But an ongoing problem was finding a means to live that would allow me the time and energy to write creatively and passionately.

After completing a BA in economics at Laval University in Quebec City in 1980, I took a couple of years to write short stories while working two days a week for my father, Daniel G. Hill III, who ran a small human rights consulting firm out of his home in Don Mills, Ontario. After that, I worked as a newspaper reporter, first as a summer intern at
The Globe and Mail
in 1982, and then as a salaried employee at the
Winnipeg Free Press
.

Reporting was, for me, an engaging and stimulating job. Time flew. Most days, I would start chasing stories at ten in the morning, and the next time I checked it would be six o’clock. An uprising in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, an Air Canada 767 running out of fuel in mid-air and making an emergency landing on a car-racing strip in Gimli, a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailing in the city…every week, it seemed, some exciting and unpredictable
story pulled me deeper into the heart of Manitoba and its people. I loved the work. There was just one problem: I loved something else more. I didn’t dream of being a reporter for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to be a reporter for any longer than it would take to put aside enough cash to coast for a year or two and do nothing but write fiction.

I had been writing short stories since I was fourteen. I wrote them through high school and university, and I kept writing them at night and on weekends while I was a reporter. But spending long hours nailing down news stories in the streets of Winnipeg and hammering them out in the downtown newsroom crowded out creative writing. Frequently I would stagger home at night, exhausted after working for twelve hours or more. Reporting left no juice for vivid, imaginative writing. I didn’t know a single full-time reporter who was managing to write and publish fiction consistently.

I longed to write creatively, and found it painful to watch other artists in full flight. I went to see the movie
Sophie’s Choice
, which came out in the early 1980s while I was still in Winnipeg. It was a sad and troubling movie, and my eyes filled with tears over the story of the young writer in New York City who happens upon a family tragedy during the Holocaust. The beauty and art in
Sophie’s Choice
reminded me of everything that I was not doing in life.

At the age of twenty-seven, I finally decided that I was wasting my years and had better quit and write what I dreamed of
writing before it was too late to change my life. It was a good time to leave the job. I had no mortgage, no car, no children, no debts and no pressing reason not to head off to pursue my dream. So I sent in my resignation letter and, soon after that, boarded an airplane for a village called Sanlúcar de Barrameda, on the Guadalquivir River near the Atlantic coast in southwest Spain. There, I wrote every day. I loved being in Spain, and much of my happiness derived from the daily pursuit of my own true working passion: writing stories. I finished a dozen or so short stories in the year I lived in Spain, and managed later to publish a few of them.

By the time I returned to Canada, I felt ready to begin writing the novel that eventually became
Some Great Thing
—but there still remained the small matter of earning a living while carving out time to write. I feared that a return to full-time journalism would throw me back into the familiar cauldron of that intense and depleting profession. And I knew that working as a freelance journalist would be unlikely to generate cash fast enough to suit my purposes. My vague plan was to earn money quickly and save it, then drop out and write fiendishly until I ran out of funds—and to keep on like this until I had finished the novel.

I sold my soul to the devil and started writing freelance speeches for anybody who would pay for them. I wrote speeches for the head of the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, and for officials in private companies. I dashed off a three-hundreddollar speech for a man to give at his own wedding—he paid me cash to ensure that
nobody knew he’d hired me to give him the words to say to his wife at the altar. But mostly, I wrote freelance speeches for senior bureaucrats and ministers of the Ontario government.

I didn’t feel proud of the work. In fact, I was disgusted with myself for writing speeches for people for whom I would never vote. But I kept on with it because it allowed me to stick with my plan. I would write a handful of speeches—which paid infinitely better than freelance journalism—and then for a few months live off my savings while madly writing fiction. And when the money ran out, I would repeat the cycle. I reassured myself every day that it was okay to keep at this wild creative dream and live like a student while other people my age were establishing themselves in careers, starting families and setting themselves up in houses.

Four years after I had dropped out of journalism, and the same year my first child was born, I managed to finish
Some Great Thing
.

I kept at the freelance speech writing for many years. It was like working to feed a habit—and my habit was writing books. It got me through the rewrites of
Some Great Thing
, which would finally find a publisher in 1992, and through
Any Known Blood
, and the first half of
The Book of Negroes
, until finally I climbed further out on my precarious limb and chose to forgo freelance work and live on savings so I could work full-time on finishing the novel.

Over the years, I’ve thought often of the many sorts of jobs that writers take on, striving to make a living while ensuring
there’s enough left in the tank to keep writing with fire. In his big-hearted book
On Becoming a Novelist
, the late American novelist John Gardner speculated about the various ways that writers could make a living while practising their true calling. You could become a teacher, he said, but quickly rejected that option. Teaching, he claimed, would burn you out. You could become a journalist. But no, he concluded, that approach would cheapen your writing. The very best way to survive as a writer, Gardner suggested, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, was to live off your spouse. It’s too bad we can’t all do that. But to my way of thinking, ultimately it does not matter exactly how you make your living. What matters is that one takes the time to write. The greatest success an artist can achieve is the regular practice of his or her passion. If you can’t go after the very thing that you were born to do, you witness the withering of your private dreams, and you suffocate.

For those who struggle to make it in a creative field, my wish is that you find enough work to live with dignity and enough space to give yourself over to your artistic drive. It’s a risky way to live, I know. But for those who were born with a “loose chromosome” (as my father used to say) and who simply have to dance or sing or make music, or paint or sculpt, or write, it’s the only way to live.

www.cbc.ca/manitoba/features/criticalmasse/

Listen to audio downloads of six episodes in the series “The Future of French in Manitoba” (2003), broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Critical Mass.

http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/language_culture/clips/3627/

View online this 1964 news clip from CBC’s Digital Archives, “Manitoba’s French Minority,” for an earlier perspective on the province’s language issues.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/road_taken/

The National Film Board presents the fascinating documentary
The Road Taken
(1996), directed by Selwyn Jacob, a look at the experience of Canada’s black sleeping-car porters from the early 1900s to the 1960s.