Lauchlin of the Bad Heart (38 page)

How did you conceive of the idea of Lauchlin’s doubly bad heart—a heart that has a congenital defect and that also renders him incapable of truly connecting with anyone?

I cannot remember coming up with the idea; it simply evolved. However, the notion of a man prevented from reaching his full potential and dreams because of a genetic disposition (Lauchlin never knew for sure how far he could have gotten in the boxing ring) was interesting to me. I was fascinated by how a fated shortfall could affect a man’s life for years to come and how this could be completely beyond his capacity to alter, despite the strength of his character. The metaphorical implications of Lauchlin’s defective heart arose naturally as I dug deeper into his personality and his life; the defect became another layer of his makeup, of his predicament.

The question of staying where your roots are or leaving home to make a new life elsewhere is central to the novel. Does your interest in this derive from Cape Breton? Do you think one option is better than the other?

My interest in this choice might have to do, in part, with Cape Bretoners’ long history of leaving home to find work and “a better life,” economically, at least. Something is gained materially when a person decides to leave, but something is also lost—community, place,
traditions, and a definite and sustaining identity. The cost is hard to measure and differs from person to person. Many are left with mixed feelings. Cape Bretoners are noted for maintaining a strong connection with home, even if they live and work far away from it.

In my father’s generation, a lot of men went off to the Great Lakes, some returning home in winter, others settling in port towns in the United States, as my father did. Some returned to Cape Breton to retire. Some people, like Lauchlin, lack the temperament necessary to remove themselves from their native community. In Lauchlin’s case, of course, he lost any will to leave after his boxing career was curtailed.

While Lauchlin stayed home, his brother left Cape Breton in search of career opportunities, but we see that Lauchlin’s brother isn’t any happier for his choice. How does this inform the “stay or go” decision that so many Cape Bretoners are forced to make?

Frank was destined to leave, it seems. And he is attracted to travel and to sophisticated activities that he might more likely pursue in a large metropolis like Toronto. He always had a desire to move; he was restless, a drinker who saw big things for himself. For him, the direction was always outward, despite the affections he held for home. He never had to ponder,
Do I stay or leave?
Leaving was a logical, necessary step. For him, home is for visiting, a place to bask in for a while, an inimitable comfort, but not a place to pursue his future.

The women in
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart
tend to be strong, optimistic, and forward-looking, while the men are often caught in the past, indecisive, and still searching for meaning or success. Did you intend this contrast?

I didn’t intend a strong or obvious contrast, but it is there to a degree. Still, even though the women seem stronger and somewhat more independent, they do have their own vulnerabilities. Morag, though she took hold of her own life, has never broken fully from Lauchlin and probably never will. Johanna, like most women of her generation in that region, didn’t question what fate had given her. She assumed a role and made the best of it. Tena has accepted her infirmity and resisted it at the same time, but so has Lauchlin. She is optimistic in some regards but not in others, and she was on the verge of having an affair with Lauchlin. What that might have done to her independence and optimism we can only guess.

Why did you choose Anne Wilkinson and Dylan Thomas as two of the poets Tena and Lauchlin read together?

I chose Wilkinson because her poems, or some of them, seemed as if they might resonate with Tena and would be accessible to her through anthologies. As for Dylan Thomas, he would have been well known when Lauchlin was in college, and the Caedmon recording would have been available to him. Thomas was a dramatic, even a hammy reader, a real performer of his own poems. Listening to such poetry on a record player
would have been part of Lauchlin’s amorous ploys at university, and so it felt natural for him to connect with Tena this way, even if he had no awareness of what he was doing.

Do you have personal experience with blindness and, if not, what research did you do to create the character of Tena?

I did not do any specific research, though I have read about blindness over the years. I’ve always been fascinated by the differences between those who are blind from birth and those who become blind later in life. The former develop a different way of conceiving the world around them, through hearing and touch; the latter can do this only to a certain extent because they are always “seeing” as they remember it, as is the case with Tena. Living as a blind person who was once sighted, it seems to me, may be more difficult than never having known sight to begin with. The blind who’ve never had sight don’t feel deprived—they have no idea what they are missing. But Tena still strives to see, she
wants
to see, and this is sometimes a torment to her.

In the story, Tena witnesses a crime; I was interested in exploring how she might suffer a dimension of terror that exceeds that of a sighted person—hearing what she hears, trying, under chilling circumstances, to make sense of the events with only her hearing and her imagination. As to her oracular powers, the strength of Tena’s imagination can sometimes move her along unusual paths.

How did you come to write a book about a boxer?

I loved boxing as a kid and would box with pals in the backyard, but the Ohio town where we lived, unlike Cape Breton, had no programs to develop young boxers. When I was twelve, I tried to enter the Golden Gloves tournament but was told I had to be sixteen. In college, I boxed with friends, but informally, casually, in a gym.

Initially, I learned about boxing by listening to the radio. I remember sitting on the floor, listening with my dad to the first Joe Louis/Jersey Joe Walcott bout, my ear to a big console. Later, television was full of great fights three nights a week, so I knew all the boxers, high and low, and I read
Ring
magazine assiduously. When I went to Stanford, boxing was still big in California; good TV matches came out of Los Angeles and San Diego. I saw several fights live, and that gives you a feel for them that television can’t capture. I think the main reason I created Lauchlin MacLean was to become a boxer myself, to imagine myself into the ring and finally get that boyhood desire out of my system.

Irish and Scottish immigrants to North America are known for their love of boxing. Did the trend originate in North America or was it brought over by immigrants?

Boxing came to North America from England in the eighteenth century. Irishmen dominated the sport in the nineteenth century because fighting prowess was prized by the Irish working class. A lot of Scottish-Canadian boxers emerged as well for similar reasons.

In Cape Breton, there’s a long tradition of dance fights. Men from rival communities would show up at a dance, and a fight with locals was expected, even anticipated. Sometimes the word went out that a particular man was looking to challenge someone else. A friend told me that where he grew up in Glace Bay, when people heard a dance was on, some would immediately ask—and this included women—“Going to be any fights?” A man might actually place a piece of wood on his shoulder (“a chip on his shoulder”) and dare another to knock it off. Then, the fight would begin. This is no doubt how some men started a career in the ring, but others never went beyond dance or street fights. It takes rigorous training, self-discipline, and self-control to be a competitive boxer.

Blair Richardson and Tyrone Gardiner are historical figures. Are any other characters in the novel based on real people?

All the champions alluded to in the book are historical, as are a few of the lesser fighters. All Lauchlin’s opponents are fictional. Blair Richardson exists in Lauchlin’s memory, as he still does for Cape Bretoners of his era. I wanted to give a sense of that remarkable time, of how unusual it was for a relatively small region like Cape Breton Island to turn out so many good boxers.

Does boxing have a presence in Cape Breton today?

It’s nothing like it was in that golden age of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the island produced several champions. I know of one gym training boxers in Sydney Mines, though I’m not aware of any professional bouts having taken place there over the last years.

Blair Richardson was one of the top middleweights in the world in the 1960s, and he fought against some of the best right at home in Glace Bay or Sydney. A fine athlete like him would probably concentrate on hockey today. That’s where the money and fame are now. Boxing once gathered up the excitement of whole communities, and there were matches in the industrial towns every week.

Have you written stories set in any of the other places you’ve lived?

I’ve set very few stories in places other than Cape Breton. California does not lack for chroniclers, and it has never reached inside me the way Cape Breton has. Some places demand a story of you; others do not.

Deep snow, sun-white, I remember, and the slow, dark haunches of the horse, his steamy huffs, fresh ruts from the runners of the big sled playing out behind us. Aunt Georgie’s house down the long, white field. Like all houses in the country, it was, to me, a boy, interesting. The idle spinning wheel on the upstairs landing. Grandma arthritic in an invalid’s chair, her rumpled, kind face. Georgie’s dry humour. A nearby stream, my boot stomping out a patch of ice, the shudder of cold water. From the kitchen window, deer, poised in a bare orchard, ears high, and the sudden mist of snow as they fled.

That trip back to Cape Breton after we moved to Ohio when I was four years old was the first way to go home, but I would find others. Until I grew up, such returns were few, since my dad, a ship’s mate on the Great Lakes, had only winters free. But our ties to where we came from were palpable and strong. Eventually, I took myself back home in both body and spirit.

Alistair MacLeod, whom I met after my first book of stories,
Eyestone,
was published, was curious as to how I’d “got it”—the feel of Cape Breton—seeing as I’d left so young. Coming from a writer synonymous with that island, MacLeod’s question was to me the greatest of compliments. He accepted the truth of my stories and was moved by them. I told him I had “got it” from my family, from visitors, stories, memories, the sound of voices, and the many summers I had already passed on that island.

Back in the 1970s, I sat with my cousin Rod on the defunct New Campbellton ferry wharf, a twilight tide curling sinuously beneath us through the tarred pilings. Rod recalled diving illicitly at night from the ferry wheelhouse, a summer thrill, and the girls he’d gone into the woods with. I envied these easy and specific memories:
this
particular connection I did not have, never could. How you grow up
in
a place cannot be learned, cannot be had second-hand. But later, I came to feel that my own perspective of Cape Breton was legitimate, too, if distanced in ways that Rod’s was not. I could see things he might not notice or wouldn’t care about. Through art, through storytelling, I drew myself closer to the life I had missed. My impulse was similar to Rod’s—to engage others in stories I had a stake in—but in another sense, mine was a need to understand, to imagine myself back, guided by what I had taken in since childhood, often unconsciously, and later built upon consciously as a man. I could take nothing for granted but my ancestry, and certain rhythms peculiar to it that I heard and felt. As my feeling for the place grew and broadened, I brought it to bear upon both past and present.

In Cape Dauphin, a couple miles from the wharf, sat the sadly vandalized house of Jim and Laura MacDermid—by then a ghost farm of a couple I once knew well. They’d raised two robust boys there, both merchant captains at a young age, until the iron ore freighters brought the family to our port town on Lake Erie. I can still hear Jim’s booming Cape Breton brogue as he swapped tales of home with my mother and father, of characters he knew, incidents he remembered, as other
lakemen did, friends and relatives who’d passed through our house while I was growing up.

Jim manned the Lake Carriers’ Association office at the harbour, hiring crewmen. After I went off to university, I’d call him when I arrived home in June, and he would sneak me in and out the back door of the hiring hall, a gate pass and a job in my hand—coal passer, deckhand. This was without a doubt unfair to other men waiting for a ship. Yet I relish the memory: the only time in my life I have been privileged—like the Catholics from a certain parish who got all the tugboat jobs—to be
on the inside, connected,
like no man out there in that waiting room, because I was Cape Breton Scotch and so was Jim MacDermid.

On the lakeboats, where I worked my way through school, I found Cape Bretoners there too. A MacQueen was skipper on the first ship I decked on, and Donny MacDermid, Jim’s son, captained a later one. They knew my family, as did another captain, “Silent” John Campbell. One Sunday as I sat alone in the sun on a fo’c’sle bench, he stopped, uncharacteristically, on his way up to his cabin and inquired about my parents. He just wanted to know if I was who he thought I was, and I was glad to say yes. I didn’t know then how much I was affirming and that later it would take me back to Boularderie, to our own land, for forty years and counting.

Our land is a ghost farm, but I’ve learned from it, too. Most of the people I know in Boularderie live on ghost farms, but if you walk these lands, clues to their former incarnations
are everywhere. The outbuildings and barns might be gone—though ours became a house—but here and there an untreed field remains, wild flora woven in now with timothy and grass. Woods have swarmed once more into tilled spaces, into moss-covered foundations. You might stumble over old fence wire embedded deep in tree trunks. Long heaps of fieldstone commemorate hard labour and original boundaries. You might spot the tossed rocks of an ash pile down a hill, the dull glitter of bottle glass. A spring still in use, which once served an uncle’s log cabin in the 1800s; two hoary, scarred maples still offering shade.

Those who worked this land are gone, but they can be conjured—an undertaking that Jessie MacDonald, my cousin Neil’s wife, was particularly good at. Right to her death at ninety-three she had a memory that wouldn’t quit. She told me a great deal about my grandparents; she had lived close to them all her married years. She lent me unforgettable glimpses into life along that road. Without her, I would never have known, for instance, about a night when she and Neil had crossed the ice of the Great Bras D’Or with only a flashlight. Their mission: to take a bottle of milk to my Grandmother MacLeod on the other side, because she lived alone then and had no cow. That went to the heart of something I wanted to keep, and which should be known.

After
Cape Breton Road
came out, I received a letter from a retired engineer in California. He hated the book, tossed it in the trash “where it belonged.” It didn’t comport with his rosy recollections of that island
(he grew up in Detroit), the childhood trips, the good times with family, and the kind of good women he thought I should have written about. I was reluctant to yank away his quilt of cozy memories, but I had to point out that dark things do happen there. To his mind, there was only one Cape Breton—his own—and my duty as a writer was to keep it intact. But there are as many visions of that island as there are writers to give them voice, each vision true in its own way.

On my wall hangs a satellite photo of Cape Breton Island and the dark ocean around it, shot from 500 miles high. I can freefall there in a glance. The sandy crescent of Aspy Bay, the stark cliffs of Meat Cove, the Everlasting Barrens, little Wolf Island offshore from Dunvegan, where Alistair MacLeod grew up, our own long island of Boularderie tucked into the eastern entrance to Bras D’Or Lake, the saltwater heart of this region. Sometimes I am asked, “Are you still writing about Cape Breton?” I say, “Yes, I am.” Some look at me, I know, a little sadly, as they might an old man who still lives with his mother. I don’t mind. I’m still getting it, and I’ll never get it all.