PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to W. J. Hawkins, 18 February 1965. MS-2-202 42.2.
Subject HeadingsIn response to specific queries about story sources from a Canadian literature graduate student at the University of New Brunswick, W. John Hawkins, T. H. Raddall outlines how he collected the factual information and then how he constructed the creative framework for three of his short stories. The three stories he dealt with were "The Amulet", "The Badge of Guilt", and "The Wedding Gift".
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February 18, 1965 Dear Mr. Hawkins: In answer to yours of February fifth. The Amulet The story is fiction based on certain actual things and scenes and people. Many years ago I saw a withered old woman sitting on the floor of a shack, the home of a Micmac family. She took no part in the conversation. When I asked who she was, they said "One of the Sa-ak-a-wach-kik" (The Ancients). They didn't laugh, but I took it as a whimsy, and probably it was. In those days I had a hobby of hunting for prehistoric Indian camp sites, both inland and on the coast of Nova Scotia. Once, at a spot called Indian Gardens on the Mersey River, an ancient camp site since submerged by a hydro- electric power dam, I was shown a little stone amulet such as the one I des- cribed in my story. Part of it was missing. The finder was a relic-hunter like myself, he refused to part with it, and what became of it afterwards I don't know. In prehistoric and partly historic times (as late as about 1745) a large tribe camped on this site. In spring many of them paddled their canoes down the river and spent the summer scattered along the adjacent coast in small fishing camps. Every time I searched in one of these coastal sites I had a romantic hope of finding the missing portion of the amulet. I never did. Once I was visited by an archaeologist, W.J.Wintemberg,1 who had done some work in Nova Scotia sites and asked to see my collection. I mentioned the stone amulet I had seen because it was unique -- at any rate I had never seen anything else of that kind. Nor had Wintemberg. We discussed the Indian belief in the transmigration of souls, human to animal or bird or fish, and wondered if the amulet had anything to do with it. A year or two later I found myself discussing these same things with a retired minister, and I men- tioned the old lady who was said to be one of the Ancients. Out of all these searches and meetings and talks came the short story I called The Amulet. It is, I think, a good example of the way a writer's mind works, subconsciously assembling various scenes and experiences, and then asking the inevitable question, "Given these facts, what might have happened?" The Badge of Guilt Much more truth than fiction. I came upon the scene, the cast, and most of the tale while staying at a small beach hotel in P.E.I. one summer early in War Two. The episode of the Montreal tarts and the white goloshes is a piquant note in Halifax wartime history. I had conversations with the young RAF fliers I described, and with the lady I called "Georgie", and of course "Mrs. Ternix". I wrote the story to get it off my mind, but for obvious reasons I made no attempt to sell it to a magazine. For the same reasons I withheld from publication "The Mistress of CKU" and several others until a sufficient time had passed for the actors to fade into anonymity. They fitted into a general theme I had in mind, and I included them in the "Muster of Arms" volume (see my Author's Note) in the spirit of now-it-can-be-told. The Wedding Gift. You are right in assuming that I went to history for the settings of the stories in this volume, and for many of the characters and incidents from which the plots emerged. In the particular story called The Wedding Gift I had the aid of such oddly assorted sources as the diary of Simeon Perkins and a privately issued volume by Henry R. Stiles entitled "Bundling, Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America", dated 1871.2 As you probably know, bundling was a common custom3 in New England during the eighteenth century, when western Nova Scotia was settled so largely by New Englanders. The actual scene of my story was the horse path which then connected Liverpool with Port Medway, crossing a rugged wooded peninsula. In his casual way Perkins mentions a man and woman making this journey in mid-winter, apparently to attend a religious service in Liverpool. I sent my man and woman the other way. Wandering preachers of various sects, including "Lady Huntingdon's Connexion", flit through Perkins' pages. I picked one of them. "Ride-and-tie" was a common method of journeying with one horse and two people when the going was rough. Perkins mentions the wreck of a ship "from Mogador in Barbary" occurring at Port Medway, and a merchant's agent there busy salvaging "goatskins in pickle, almonds, worm- seed, pomegranate skins and gum arabic". That was marvellous. In constructing the plot I wished to tell the story so that what French writers call the "clou" came in the last line or two. This is a good and interesting form, although it has been much misused. People like O. Henry used to build a whole story around a trick ending; it was an amusing stunt, like that of a parlor magician, and just as artificial. It is much more difficult to produce a story involving people and a situation that are true to life and highly interesting right from the start, and top it all with one fact, one phrase, that throws a new illumination on the whole like a flash of lightning. Mr. John Hawkins, Enfield,N.S. |
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