PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Isabel LeBourdais, 12 August 1953. MS-2-202 42.98.
Subject HeadingsJust after returning from the 1953 annual conference of the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) in Toronto, T. H. Raddall writes to congratulate Isabel LeBourdais, the President of the Toronto Branch of CAA, on such a well run conference. Raddall reviews his impressions of his CAA sponsored debate with Nicholas Monsarrat and contrasts their very different writing styles. In response to a question posed by LeBourdais, Raddall concludes the letter with a detailed explanation of his characterization of the three main characters in his novel The Nymph and the Lamp.
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Isabel LeBourdais Sans Souci, Ont August 12th,1953 Dear Isabel, Your island in Georgian Bay sounds attractive, a good place to recover from the labors and headaches of that strenuous convention, and at that distance a good place to contemplate the true success of what you wrought. For it was a first-rate job, and nobody but you could have put it over with the same blend of energy and finesse. I confess I was extremely dubious when the Monsarrat debate was laid in my lap,1 for I'd never met the man and I knew that his oddities included a certain waspishness in matters of opinion that might prove embarrassing all round. However it turned out well. Some people didn't like him -- too much self-opinion and so on -- but I found him a good enough fellow at heart in the several conversations I had with him in Toronto, and I think I understood him. He seemed to me a completely honest man, basically shy, a little unsure of himself, a little overwhelmed by the suddenness of his own success after years of struggle, and (this is important) a man still tortured by his own impressions of the war at sea. The abrupt, erratic, assertive manner seemed to me something like a shield thrown out as a guard for all this. Our difference of opinion over working method was fundamental, of course. I didn't elaborate my side of it, for I felt that the main thing was to get Monsarrat to talk. However I still hold that the rigid plotting of a novel before writing is too mechanical, too unlike life itself, to ring true; and his own flat statement that he never lets a character develop of his own or her own accord with the unfolding of the tale was in fact a confession of his own limitations as a writer. The truth is that Monsarrat's books are histories rather than novels, for they deal with actual men and actual incidents, assembled and blended skilfully to form a whole. When you write history you need no plot. Even your timing is set forth exactly by the calendar. (I enclose a cutting from the Times Literary Supplement, which chimes with my own notions on the subject.) I hold with Maugham2 when he says that every story has a certain natural curve from start to finish, and the novelist's task is to find that curve and follow it to the end. That can only come from his own intuition as he goes along, as I see it, and that is the way I write. I read your comments on The Nymph and The Lamp with deep interest and appreciation. But I'm a little surprised at your question about Carney's capacities as a lover. The point is that he had not "led an entirely sexless life by choice and inclination". As he pointed out to Isabel in one of their first conversations, he had always been drawn to women, he admired the way they talked, the way they moved, everything about them. But as I pointed out in the first (no, the second) chapter of the book, he had recoiled from the kind of women who came within his reach about the ports, and he was too shy, too awkward and too poor to make any headway with the virtuous women who were his ideal. So after a time he gravitated to the lonely places where his longing could be sublimated in sheer space. I have met more than one such man, and I felt sorry for them. When Carney met Isabel, and she threw herself into his arms, a woman as lonely as himself, moreover a "nice" woman of the kind he'd dreamed about all that time, can you doubt that Isabel found him shy, awkward, blundering -- but passionate -- as I wrote? Observe that Skane and Carney had both fled from women to the life on Marina, Skane because he was satiated and fed up with the lot, Carney because he preferred a lonely corner of hell to the longings of Tantalus. After two years on Marina Skane's reaction was that of Carney, a passion suppressed but rebellious for all that, the reaction of all healthy male flesh in that environment. Therefor [sic] when Isabel came into their lives the physical result was the same, for them and for her. Hunger is the best sauce in more things than cooking, and in Carney's case the hunger had been longer and was the keener because it could be satisfied only by the realisation of an ideal. Skane was a good fellow, of course. He had suffered a bitter experience and the mark was deep. He hadn't Carney's strength of character but he was no weakling and no villain. When Skane realised that Isabel's pity for Carney might mean the end of his own chances he gave way to a burst of selfishness -- the selfishness of any passionate man where a woman is concerned. In that he was quite human; and it was human in a man blinded mentally by passion and selfishness to base his appeal on a human selfishness in the woman. Isabel had no selfishness. Or had she? Read again Captain O'Dell's soliloquy at the book's end. That was the question I left with the reader. Edith joins me in all the best to you and Don. |
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