PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Mr. Berton E. Robinson, 9 March 1971. MS-2-202 47.13.
Subject HeadingsIn a letter to Berton Robinson of the Nova Scotia Department of Education, T. H. Raddall indicates his willingness to take part in a summer school course proposed by Robinson. To assist Robinson in his course preparation, Raddall gives a brief overview of his goals in writing The Nymph and the Lamp, how he had based the plot on a composite of actual people and events, the negative reaction his story had received initially from his publishers, and an account of the book's popularity nationally and internationally.
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March 9,1971 Mr. Berton E. Robinson,University Grants Committee, 5413 Spring Garden Road, Halifax,N.S. Dear Bert: Regarding your letter of February 24th. I would be willing to come to Halifax in July or early August, for a meeting with Callaghan and MacLennan,1 and your Summer School class, if you can arrange it. Dec. 1971 Nothing came of this. About The Nymph and The Lamp. My intention in writing the novel was simply to tell a story, a love story if you like, in which a man's faith in duty, as well as his love for her, eventually wakened those qualities in herself. The background of Sable Island was very familiar to me,2 and important to the story. Most of the characters were drawn from real people, on various stations like Sable (the shooting accident actually happened on a lonely station in Labrador) and I assembled them in the Sable Island scene for the purposes of my story. In the young operator named Jim Sargent you have a small portrait of the author as a very young man. When I proposed to write this novel, my publishers were horrified. I had written three historical novels with some success in the market and with the critics, and they urged me to keep on with costume pieces. Publishers like to have all their authors in neat little pigeonholes, of course. To jump into a contemporary novel, or at any rate a novel pitched in my own lifetime, moreover a novel involving a love affair between a middleaged man and a not-very-beautiful virgin nearing the dreadful age of thirty, seemed utter madness to the publishers. They wouldn't give me a contract for it, and I had to finance myself (and support my wife and children) during the whole period from November 1948 when I started the book, to April 1950 when I finished it. It proved to be my most successful book, not only with the critics, but with the public. It has been printed in various English editions in Canada, Britain, and the U.S., and in every European language west of the Iron Curtain. To the end of 1970 it had sold 682,410 copies (323,982 hardbacks, 358,428 softbacks) and it has appeared in radio and TV plays3 in Canada, Britain and the U.S. At the present time it is under option to a Hollywood group for movie production, but as you know an option is only a tentative thing. |
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