Elle (24 page)

Glover's stories have been frequently anthologized, notably
in
The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories,
and
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories.
His criticism has appeared in the
Globe and Mail,
the
New York Times Book Review;
the
Washington Post Book World,
the
Boston Globe Books,
and the
Los Angeles Times.

Since he settled in upstate New York in the early 1990s, Glover has taught at Skidmore College, Colgate University, Davidson College, the State University of New York at Albany, and Vermont College. He has also been writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, the University of Lethbridge, St. Thomas University, and Utah State University. For two years he produced and hosted
The Book Show,
a weekly literary interview program which originated at WAMC in Albany and was syndicated on various public radio stations and around the world on Voice of America and the Armed Forces Network. From 1996 to 2007, he edited the annual
Best Canadian Stories.

1.
How did you first come across the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, and why were you inspired you to write a novel about her?

I first read about Marguerite in Francis Parkman's multivolume history of New France. He has about a page and half on her, and that was my primary source, though I did track her down in several other books as well. There really isn't much to go on.

I thought about writing her story because she struck me as one of those indomitable people I always admire, the ones who survive and even thrive on whatever life or history throws at them. Also, it was remarkable that she survived by herself when the large expedition brought to colonize Canada by Sieur de Roberval and Jacques Cartier couldn't succeed. So that gave me a speculative line of attack. Why did she succeed when her companions died, when Sieur de Roberval's colony failed? How was she different? And that led me to speculate that her motives were somehow purer, that she was closer in her attitudes to what we might call the forces of life, and this allowed her also to be more open to native culture. This fascinated me.

2.
You say in your
Author's Note
that you have tried to “mangle and distort the facts” as best you can, and your novel is rich in anachronisms. What is your vision of the historical novel?

There are two kinds of historical novels: one tries to tell the reader about a particular moment in history, and the other tries to tell the reader what history is. I write the second kind. My novels (I include in this
The Life and Times of Captain N.)
are a meditation on the nature of history and how it threads through people's lives. I am not interested in creating a costume epic or an historical romance or a documentary drama. To me, people are like prisms, and history is like light shining through them. People are much the same everywhere and at any time, it seems to me. But history flows around and through them, affecting social and economic conditions, communal behaviours, and the ideas they reason with. The ideas history presents to any individual at a given time and place are especially interesting to me. Mostly we're not even aware of how they come from outside ourselves and shape our lives. The old ideas or the newly fashionable ideas — they almost always seem to come from inside our own heads. In my novels, I am trying to remind people of this. The anachronisms are all purposeful. And some aren't even anachronisms; they are just surprising facts. For example, the popularity of tennis in 16th-century France in
Elle
and Tom Wopat's sunglasses in
The Life and Times of Captain N.
The anachronisms are meant to do two things: 1) startle the reader into a sense of the flow of history, and 2) make the reader aware of the way the past and the present interpenetrate one another (which is really saying the same thing in a different way). Ask
yourself how aware you are of when the ideas you think with — that is, your beliefs and habits of reasoning — were invented, by whom, and where? What was it like before those ideas?

When I wrote “mangle and distort,” I was being ironic.
Elle
is a novel; it's not meant to be true. And the “true” historical accounts of Marguerite's adventure aren't very dependable, to say the least. So there isn't much real fact to measure my book against.

3.
Your novel has frequently been described by reviewers as “Rabelaisian,” and the famous French satirist even makes a cameo appearance as Elle's lover F. What interested you about Rabelais, and how is he important to this novel?

Well, one of the things I like to think about is how the history of an epoch influences the lives of the people living in it. So I was very interested in what was going on in Elle's mind as she set off for Canada. All sorts of fascinating things were happening in France and Europe at the time: the popularity of tennis, the kind of puerile medieval machismo of the ruling classes, the invention of Protestantism and the Catholic reaction to it, the invention of books, the transition out of Renaissance humanism into something more modern (including the invention of the novel, the form I was writing in). Then I noticed that Rabelais was a popular writer at the time and that, in fact, he disappeared off the radar (in terms of his biographers) about the time Marguerite de la Rocque's adventures were taking place. Several biographers noticed the parallel between Cartier's voyages and the trip west that Panurge and his friends took and suggested
that there might even have been some connection between the two men. No one knows. This is highly speculative. So I was free to invent inside the gap.

Rabelais's famous “book”
(La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel)
came out in five volumes, and the fifth volume
(Le Cinquieme Livre)
was published after his death. Most critics agree that he didn't write all of it. Someone patched together his notes and fragments and filled in the spaces. That's where I got the idea that Elle could help him finish the book, thus, rather cheekily, giving Canada a direct role in the invention of the great modern literary form, the novel.

And, of course, some people call my writing Rabelaisian, which I take to mean a kind of writing that takes a certain joyful interest in matters relating to the body and juxtaposing this interest with higher things to create a comic tension. This is quite true of the way I work.

The Voyages of Jacques Cartier
translated and edited by Henry Percival Biggar (with an introduction by Ramsay Cook). University of Toronto Press, 1993.

This book contains translations of Cartier's trip journals for all three voyages plus some supplementary documents dealing with Roberval. The narrative is remarkably easy to read: it's a snapshot of the first encounter between Europeans and Canadians.

Pioneers of France in the New World
by Francis Parkman. Little, Brown and Co., 1865.

This book is part of Parkman's multi-volume history of New France. Energetic, dramatic, romantic, and Victorian. A great read. This is where I first came upon the story of the Isle of Demons and the marooned young woman.

The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
by J. Huizinga. Penguin, 1965.

Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640: An Essay on Historical Psychology
by Robert Mandrou. Holmes & Meier, 1976.

These two books were especially helpful in giving me a feel for 16th-century France — an alien, violent, childish, religious world. Fascinating reading.

Gargantua and Pantagruel
by Francois Rabelais, translated by Burton Raffel. WW Norton, 1990.

Also, of course, everyone should look at Rabelais himself. Here is a good contemporary translation.

The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures 1504-1700: A Study in Canadian Civilization
by Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey. University of Toronto Press, 1969.

Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey (whom I once met in the library at the University of New Brunswick years and years ago) wrote this wonderful book. It's a brilliant and suggestive account of the history and economics, and tries to give a sense of how the native Canadians reacted to contact with Europeans. Well written and fun to read.

Naskapi: The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula
by Frank G. Speck. University of Oklahoma Press, 1935.

This has great old photos including pictures of bear skulls suspended from trees — the sort of thing that made the world of the Canadians Elle encounters come to life for me.

And a book I loved:

Labrador Winter: The Ethnographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1928,
edited by Eleanor B. Leacock and Nan A. Rothschild. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Strong simply went up to Labrador on his own and lived with a couple of hunting bands, lived as they lived. His journals are full of strikingly human material, mysterious, poignant, and real.