PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Miss Edith Rogers, 21 March 1954. MS-2-202 47.15.
Subject HeadingsWithin a few days of receiving a request for detailed information about his writing career from Acadia University graduate student, Edith Rogers, T. H. Raddall replies with a lengthy and carefully organized response. In addition, Raddall encloses relevant articles and concisely up-dates a bibliography of his works that was included in one of the articles. Raddall's response provides a descriptive chronology of his writing career with asides on the reception of publishers and the public to his work, his writing style, inspiration and methodology, and self-assessment. He concludes by stating that he does not like to write about himself but did it to assist her in writing her thesis. In return Raddall only requests a copy of her completed thesis.
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Sunday Dear Miss Rogers, Replying to your letter of the eleventh, I enclose a newspaper clipping which gives the text of an address I gave, to Prince of Wales College1 in Charlottetown last Tuesday. In it I set forth my credo with particular ref- erence to the novel, although it gives my views of in general. I enclose also a copy of Canadian Author & Bookman2 containing an article on "My First Book", as distinct from "My First Novel" which I described in the radio address3 you have. As you will see, the editors of Author & Bookman appended a complete list of my books, where published, and so on. To bring this up to date you should add:- TIDEFALL, a novel, the rise and fall of a scoundrel in the West Indies and on the Nova Scotia coast during the rum-running era of the 1920's and early 30's. Published 1953 in cloth covers by McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, and by Little, Brown & Company, Boston. Published 1954 in a special cloth edition by the Book League of America, New York. Published in 1954 in a pocket-book edition by Popular Library, New York. Published 1954 in a pocket- book edition by Harlequin Books, Toronto. Published in cloth 1954 by Hutchin- son & Company, London. A MUSTER OF ARMS, collection of short stories, tales of the Canadian east coast in wartime, the reactions of men and women under separation and strain. To be published in Autumn, 1954, by McClelland & Stewart, Toronto. I enclose with these a typewritten copy of the "About The Author" material used by my publishers in giving information to the trade. It gives the essential facts and it is correct. I have written two short stories for children. One, "Brooms for Sale", appears in the school reader called "Wide Open Windows", published by Copp Clark. The other, "Christmas at Sable Island" (fragment of my own life) appears in the school reader called "All Sails Set", also published by Copp Clark. Thus, with the exception of about six, which could not be fitted into any of the book collections after magazine publication, all of my short stories will be in book form with the publication of "A Muster of Arms". Apart from the collections issued by my own publishers a number of my short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as:- "Canadian Pattern", edited by J.D.Robbins, published by Wm.Collins & Sons "A Pocketful of Canada" " " " " " " " "The Voice of Canada" ................................ " J.M.Dent & Sons "Poetry and Prose for Enjoyment" ............... " " " " "A Book of Canadian Humour" ... J.D.Robbins " Ryerson Press "A Book of Canadian Stories" .. Desmond Pacey " Ryerson Press "Essays & Short Stories for Matriculation Classes" J.M.Dent & Sons 2 None of my work has appeared as yet in moving pictures. "Roger Sudden" has appeared as a play on TV in Canada. "The Nymph & The Lamp" appeared on TV in the United States in 1952 as an hour-long play starring Robert Preston and Margaret Sullavan. "Roger Sudden", "Pride's Fancy", "The Nymph & The Lamp" have all been broadcast as radio plays in the United States and Canada. My first short story, "Three Wise Men", was published in Maclean's Magazine4 in 1928. It was, like all experiments, blindly constructed and poor stuff, but I think worth the $60 that Maclean's paid me for it. I was then working all day as a book-keeper in a wood-pulp mill on the Mersey River, and doing my writing at night, as a hobby. When I had been married for a year on $100 per month the hobby became a means (I hoped) of adding to my income. With this in view I wrote a number of tales of adventure about the world, aimed at the cheaper American magazines which specialized in that sort of thing and paid much better rates than Maclean's.5 The tales were trash and I knew it, but the mere practice of writing them taught me a good deal. Nevertheless it wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to write about Nova Scotians on land and sea, the kind of life and people I knew, and I wanted to write about them with a style and quality of my own. After much experiment I had found a style that came naturally to me, and I wrote a short story called "Tit for Tat", based on a local incident, a quaint little feud between a Micmac Indian and a lumberman. I worked very hard to get the effect I wanted, and in all I think I wrote the story five or six times -- each writing involving many nocturnal hours at a battered old Underwood. I sent it to Maclean's Magazine, in Toronto. The editor rejected it with a two-page letter, telling me in detail all that was wrong with it. He was being kind. He might have sent it back with a printed rejection slip. But I was angry because I wanted to write my way, not his or anybody else's way, and I was dis- couraged, because his was the leading Canadian magazine and it seemed obvious that if I couldn't sell a Canadian story in Canada there was no hope for it any- where. In this spirit I decided to write no more, money or no money. The great Depression of the 1930's was in full swing at this time, many of the smaller magazines were ceasing publication, and those still publishing were digging into their reserves of previously purchased fiction to a large extent. It was no time to be a writer. In the next three years I devoted my spare time to a study of Nova Scotia history, in which I had always been interested. A Liverpool woman, an elderly retired teacher, drew my attention to the story of the Nova Scotia privateers in the wars between 1775 and 1 815, many of whom had sailed out of Liverpool. I had shifted my employment down the river to Liverpool, where the Mersey Paper Company had recently built a large mill. Here I came in contact with Colonel C.H.L.Jones, a man deeply interested in history,6 especially nautical history as it applied to Nova Scotia. At his urging I wrote the small books "Saga of The Rover" and "The Markland Sagas", which were printed in limited editions and distributed by his company. Other than these I wrote nothing until 1933 when, on a sudden whim, I mailed the story "Tit for Tat" to Blackwood's Magazine, of Edinburgh.7 It was sheer audacity, for I knew Blackwood's had a high literary standard; but I had observed that it published tales from all parts of the Empire except Canada, except on rare occasions, and I suspected that the omission was simply due to a lack of Canadian contributors. I expetced a flat rejection. Instead I received a very kind letter from George William Blackwood himself,8 accepting my story and asking for more. He enclosed a cheque at Blackwood's standard rate, which at the existing rate of sterling yielded me about twice what Maclean's had paid me for "Three Wise Men." Thus began a long and happy connection with Blackwood's, which brought me the friendly interest of Kipling, John Buchan, and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.,9 and led eventually to a career. George Blackwood was my idea of the perfect editor. If a story failed to 3 meet his standard of material and workmanship he rejected it and that was that. Not once did he try to tell me how to write. And when he accepted a story he printed it without changing so much as a comma -- a priceless satisfaction to any writer who has worked hard and honestly on his tale. More than this he gave me my own head in the choice of material, so that in his pages I was able to try my had at drama and comedy, in the present and in the past, and with a choice of characters running all the way from a retired Loyalist colonel to a modern wireless operator. My annual output was small. My job in the financial department of the paper company kept me working long hours, often I had to go back and work at night, and my free week-ends I usually spent in the woods because after all that desk work I needed hard exercise and fresh air. My writing was done on wet or stormy evenings and week-ends. I was never a facile writer. Each tale came slowly, and each was written and re-written several times before it went to Blackwood. When a story failed to satisfy me after these re-writings I tore it up. On the whole during these laborious years of the 1930's I think I destroyed two-thirds of my writing. This required some fortitude, as you can guess, but it was good for me and for my work. Also it was good for my reputation with editors. Care in the construction of a tale, even of a paragraph, is evident to a good editor in one reading, and even though he may reject the story for its theme he will keep a careful eye for further contributions from the same author. By 1935 I knew that writing was the career for me. But the times were still hard. My pay as an accountant was $1750 a year, to which I was adding from $300 to $500 with my pen. I had a wife and two babies to support. I felt that if I could give my whole time to writing I could perhaps triple the income from my pen, and with some luck I might perhaps equal the income from my job. But I could not throw up my job and risk that without a substantial sum in the bank to tide me over the bad spots. My wife was wonderful. "Pinching and scraping" is not only a trite phrase but a term utterly inadequate for what she accom- plished, not only then, but in the first few year s after 1938, when I threw up my job and launched forth as a professional writer. The first gleam of sunshine came late in 1940, when an agent in New York, having seen some of my tales in Blackwood, got a fresh story from me and sold it to the Saturday Evening Post for $500. In 1941 he sold three stories to the Post for $600 each. In 1942 the Post and Collier's Magazine were paying $800 for each of my stories.10 At the end of that year the Post offered me an agreement for $900 per story, plus a substantial bonus if I contributed a minimum of six acceptable stories during the following year. I quote these figures to show how my financial worries were erased by the end of 1942. It seemed obvious that I could keep on in this way, writing tales for the "slick" magazines and cashing fat cheques at the bank. But now my inner daemon was prodding me towards another tough decision. In 1939 Blackwood's had published some of my tales in book form under the title "The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek", with a very kind foreword by Lord Tweedsmuir. Their edition was selling slowly but steadily when the great German blitz of 1940 destroyed the London warehouse in which most of it was stored. The ration- ing of paper had begun and there was no prospect of a further printing. Tweedsmuir was urging me to bring out a book of historical short stories about Nova Scotia. Also he had Theodore Roosevelt and the American novelist Kenneth Roberts11 urged me to write a novel telling the story of Nova Scotia's part in the American Revolution, the enormous significance of which few Canadians and fewer Americans knew. At first I had refused to tackle anything but short stories, but the story of the Nova Scotians between 1775 and 1783 had always interested me, [sic] I had found a good deal of material in Liverpool and elsewhere on the South 4 Shore, and I felt strongly that the impression of that time given in our school histories was inadequate and false. therefore during 1941, after careful prel- iminary researches in the Nova Scotia Archives and on the ground at Fort Cumber- land (now of course called Beausejour) and elsewhere, I wrote the novel called "His Majesty's Yankees". It was published in New York and Toronto in 1942. The reviews on the whole were very good. One critic called it "the historical fiction discovery of the year." The sales were not large but the publishers showed a surprising confidence and urged me to write another. Here, then, was a problem. The experience of writing "His Majesty's Yan- kees" had taught me that I had a one-track mind. The technique of the short story and of the novel are two very different things, and it requires a very special genius to skip lightly from one to another. That is why few successful short story writers ever attempt a novel, and why few novelists ever write a good short story. My own experience showed me that each type required the utmost concentration over a considerable period of time,to get and to keep one's mind set in that frame, and that the attempt to write a novel and turn out short stories as "pot-boilers" at the same time was bound to result in bad work one way or the other. Therefore if I undertook the writing of novels I must set aside the writing of short stories for the duration of each novel -- which meant a year at least and perhaps two years if the workmanship was to be my best. Apart from all this I was now beginning to suffer the effects of continual overwork for the past ten or twelve years, and I found that my cherished interludes on foot or by canoe in the woods no longer restored the balance. To turn down the Post offer, and the ready market for other short stories in magazines in Canada, United States and Britain which were now open to me, seemed a bit mad after the long struggle of the 30's. On the other hand I was acutely aware that magazines are read and thrown away, and their authors are seldom remembered longer than from one issue to the next. Kenneth Roberts (who had started his career as a Post writer) pointed this out to me with his characteristic vehemence, declaring that the only way to a solid literary reputation was the publication of books, which have some permanence and are kept alive by re-reading, by the stocking of libraries, and by the discussion of critics, teachers and litterateurs. I was acutely aware also that the novelist is peculiarly at the mercy of the critics and the public, for the one may condemn and the other refuse to buy. With about five exceptions every Canadian who had chosen to live by the writing of books in the past had ended his days in poverty or on the charity of his friends. Even the dean of Canadian authors, the great Sir Charles G.D.Roberts,12 had lived his last years on a pension contrived for him by powerful friends. I shrank from the thought of anything like that. Yet here was the choice. The book publishers were thinking in terms of the historical novel, of course. They like to have everything and every author in neat compartments. And I had in my mind, after "His Majesty's Yankees", two historical themes that begged to be written. One was a story, based partly on the life of Michael Francklyn,13 dealing with the foundation of Halifax in 1749 and the struggle between Halifax and Louisburg as rival fortresses until Louisburg was crushed in 1758. The other was a story of the Liverpool (N.S.) privateers who fought the French and Spaniards in the West Indies during the late 1790's and early 1800's, with particular reference to Haiti and the Negro leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, with whom certain Liverpool men had had remarkable dealings.14 So I made a contract with Doubleday, and with McClelland & Stewart, for a second historical novel, with an option on a third.15 "Roger Sudden" was published in 1944, the most successful of my books except "The Nymph & The Lamp" which appeared long afterwards. The publishers exercised their option on the third historical novel, and while I was writing it McClelland & Stewart brought out in 1945 another book of my short stories previously published in 5 magazines, entitled "Tambour". Of the stories in this volume "Tambour" itself is based on an actual affair in a Canadian wireless station that occurred in my own time as an operator: "Bald Eagle" is partly drawn from the career of that gifted impostor Grey Owl,16 who (unknown to most Canadians) started his strange career in Nova Scotia and enlisted in the Canadian Army at Digby in 1915: "MacIvor's Salvation" is a tale drawn from my own life; indeed all these tales are based upon fact as are all my novels and short stories: "Blind McNair", which has been oddly neglected by the editors of anthologies, I consider one of the best short stories I ever produced. In 1946 my third costume novel "Pride's Fancy" was published in New York and Toronto. The town of "Gosport" is of course Liverpool,N.S., and the character of "Mr. Pride" is drawn from the forceful Enos Collins, who afterwrads removed to Halifax, founded a bank, and became Canada's first millionaire.17 In 1947 McClelland & Stewart published a volume of my historical short stories, indeed the volume for which Lord Tweedsmuir had pleaded, entitled "The Wedding Gift." Here again the town is Liverpool in colonial days, and for the doings of "Colonel Larrabee" I drew heavily upon the careful and voluminous diary of Simeon Perkins, the Pepys of Nova Scotia and for more than forty years the town's most prominent citizen.18 Here again I think the story entitled "The Wedding Gift", from which the book's title is drawn, is one of my best. All of these tales were written for magazines before I turned to the writing of novels. In the summer of 1947 I became involved in my lone venture as publisher as well as author of a book. During the late war the West Nova Scotia Regiment was drawn from my part of the province, [sic] I knew many of the officers and men who served in it overseas, and I commanded a rifle platoon in the Reserve battalion of the regiment on coastal defences. In this second summer after the end of the war a number of ex-officers of the regiment approached me and asked me to write the war history of the regiment.19 I agreed to do it, gratis, if they undertook the cost and responsibility of publishing it. They had some vague promises from one or two wealthy ex-officers about financing the book, and on the strength of these promises they ran up large bills for plates and made a fatuous agreement with a shrewd publisher in Montreal. I wrote the book after long research and many consultations with officers and men scattered all over the province, and then discovered that the financial arrangements had proved empty, and that the ex-officers of the committee, most of them college students or men grappling with new jobs on small salaries, were faced with bills that they could not pay and a publishing agreement that they could not meet. Rather than see my work wasted, and the regiment's splendid record overseas lost to posterity, I stepped in, paid all the bills and saw the thing through. It involved me in heavy financial loss, but I have never regretted it, the story of the regiment was well worth preserving and making public, and the book has served as a model for several other regimental histories across Canada. In the early 1940's the New York firm of Doubleday asked me to write a history of the city of Halifax as one of their "Famous Port" series, of which Stephen Leacock had done the book on Montreal, and Mazo de la Roche the one on Quebec.20 I demurred, pointing out that Halifax was now making history in another great war, the full details of which could not be revealed until peace came. So the project was dropped until 1947, when the Canadian firm of McClelland & Stewart, foreseeing the 200th anniversary of the founding of Halifax in 1749, asked me to write the book. I had spent part of my boyhood in Halifax, had seen it from the viewpoint of a young sailor in after years, and had always been interested in the city's story from the time I first saw it as a child in 1913. I undertook the work happily, it was one of the most interesting and satisfying things I have ever done, and the book appeared in the autumn of 1948. The price was high, for McClelland & Stewart had deter- mined on a "prestige" job, with first-rate paper, printing, binding, and expensive plates. Hence the book was not a best-seller in the ordinary sense, 6 but it proved to be what publishers call a "stayer", with a steady sale going on year after year. It won me my second Governor-General's Award. (The first Award was for "The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek".) At this point in my career I had to make another change. My historical novels had done well for the publishers and they wished me to keep on with them. But it had never been my intention to become "typed" as a costume novelist. I had been interested in history from boyhood, and I had written three novels on themes historical because I knew a good deal about them and the scenes in which they were staged. But I wished to write some novels staged in my own time, too, just as in my short stories I had written about the present as well as the past. To go on writing costume novels would have been safe and profitable for the publishers and no doubt for me, but it meant settling down in a groove, and I have fought against that all my life. So I notified the publishers that I intended to write my next two or three novels about contemporary life or at any rate the life of people in my own experience. My Canadian publishers were philosophical about it but the American publisher obviously thought I was mad. This led to a breach with Doubleday, and my New York agent soon found that other publishers had the same view. They were ready, indeed eager, to contract for costume novels from my pen but they would not commit themselves in any way to my venture into the modern field. In other words, like the man from Missouri, they "had to be shown". I accepted their doubts as a challenge. Kipling had said that when you found you could do something well it was time to do something else, and to me that made sense of the finest kind. The writer's true field is humanity itself, not just one phase of it or one period of time; and in any case the writer who settles in a facile and comfortable groove is bound to find eventually that his mind has taken on the pattern of the groove, it is no longer possible to climb out, and in the meantime he has lost the fresh and eager outlook which makes the difference between the artist and the hack. All through 1949 I worked on "The Nymph and The Lamp", a novel based on certain scenes and happenings in my own days as a wireless operator. (I was the "Sargent" of the story, and in that shy and ingenuous creature you have a small portrait of the author as a young man!) As in all my novels I knew my characters, I knew where the tale should start, and I knew the end I intended to bring about, but the plot itself had to be worked out day by day, chapter by chapter, as I went along, a slow and painful process like life itself. Many writers do have the whole plot in their minds when they begin, and I have heard more than one boast that he or she could have written any chapter in it from the first. That has always seemed to me a rigid business. Life is not like that. People change in their outlook and emotions as time goes by and with the various human contacts that they make, they are individuals, not automatons, and as you live with them you come to realise how a simple incident can change the whole course of their affairs. The writer does not reveal them. They reveal themselves, bit by bit, to him and through him to his readers. In this way the book went on through the winter of 1949-50. I was at my desk each morning from eight o'clock to noon. Each afternoon I spent outdoors, walking, fishing or hunting in the season, or golfing or simply chatting on the docks with the fishermen and sailors. Each evening I went to my desk at seven and remained there or tramping up and down my den, until midnight -- often until one or two o'clock in the morning if the thread of thought went well. This has been my working habit for years. You must not suppose that I am actually writing all these hours each day. The intuitive process on which I depend does not yield much at a time. But it demands an almost ferocious concentration for hours on end. From time to time a lead suggestsitself and I write down as much as has been revealed. Sometimes the lead proves false, and I may write several days and many pages before the genuine daemon appears and tells me so. Then I tear up those pages and go back to the point where I went astray. Each night, at the 7 end of the day's work, I turn away from the creative struggle and go over what I have written from the viewpoint of simple workmanship, changing a word or a phrase here and there, shifting a whole paragraph perhaps to a place where it seems properly to belong, and so on. The word in my trade is "polishing", and I prefer to do it thus, day by day, rather than one monumental polishing when the whole story is down on paper. When the story is finished I type clean copy for the printers myself, so that I can give it a final polishing in the light of all the months and all the work that has gone by. I finished "The Nymph and The Lamp" on a day in April 1950. The title did not come to me until I was typing the clean copy a week or two later. Here is my diary entry on the day I finished the working copy:- "I worked all day and towards five in the afternoon wrote the last word of my novel, which I began in November 1948. I think I shall call it "Castaways" or "One Fair Spirit". It will take about a month to type a clean copy for the publishers and do the last-minute polishing. Now that it is finished the plot seems simple, even trite, and the characters in no way distinguished; yet it is the product of the longest and most arduous labor I have yet performed. It is a romance of course but I think I have sketched faithfully life in an isolated wireless station as I knew it nearly thirty years ago, and a glimpse of Halifax and the Annapolis Valley in the hectic post-war days of '20 and '21." I sent the typescript to Little, Brown & Company, the American publishers, who had been cautious about a contract like all the others but whose chief exec- utive had asked me to let him see the book first.21 A long delay. Then a wire:- "Was in California when manuscript arrived and have just finished reading it. I am pleased impressed and moved. It is a magnificent story of real people in a challenging situation. Letter and contract follow." The book was a success with the critics and with the public. So far it has sold almost as many copies in cloth and in paper-backed editions as all my other books put together. I don't play favorites, with my books or anything else; but if posterity offered to preserve two of my books only, I should prefer to be remembered for "Halifax, Warden of the North", because it is the true story of a city I loved, and "The Nymph and The Lamp", because it is in many ways carved out of the warm life of my youth, which I loved also. After the long effort on "The Nymph and The Lamp" I was exhausted in body and spirit. For many months I spent all possible time outdoors, in the woods or wandering about the coast, sometimes alone, sometimes with my wife. It was not until the autumn of 1951 that the urge to write came back again. The theme that suggested itself was one that had been long in my mind, in fact ever since the days of Prohibition, when rum-running craft (including such ships as the famous "I'm Alone") were operating out of Liverpool and I used to go on board and chat with the crews about their adventures on Rum Row22 and the West Indies. My publishers were ready with contracts, but when I told them what was in my mind they were a little dismayed. The central figure would be a nautical scoundrel who had no appeal to women and no interesting vices. The other characters, even the leading lady, would be comparatively minor, and they would be weak, or selfish, or (in the case of the girl herself) a woman lost in dreams of her weak and amiable father. The publishers said truthfully that such a tale would find nothing like the acceptance of "The Nymph and The Lamp". I replied that I was writing about life as I had seen it, and it was neither possible nor desirable to write about admirable people all the time. As always the writing of the book was a long and difficult job. I finished the first draft of it in the early summer of 1952, but I was dissatisfied with it, and during the following autumn and winter I re-wrote a great part of it and struck out two or three chapters that had no direct bearing on the plot and merely cluttered up the tale. With all this done the story had (for me at 8 any rate) the authentic ring which had been missing when I finished the first draft. The book was published in the United States and Canada in the autumn of 1953. As the publishers predicted "Tidefall" did not meet with the eager public acceptance that had greeted "The Nymph and The Lamp". With its more sombre theme I had not expected that it would. Nevertheless it has done well enough in the marketplace, and its reception by the leading critics in Canada and the United States was enthusiastic. (One review went so far as to call it "the finest novel yet written by a Canadian", but this I doubt, not from modesty but from the hard-headed appraisal of a mind that has worked too long and too hard to have any illusions of that sort.) During the past autumn and winter I have been working on the short stories for "A Muster of Arms". Some of these appeared in magazines during the late war. The rest have been written from notes I made during the war with such a volume in mind, in the spirit of Philip Gibbs' book "Now It Can Be Told", which appeared at a decent interval after War One.23 Some of the themes are dramatic, some are merely humorous, one or two may shock the prudes or those who look for glamor even on the underside of war and far beyond the music of the band. All are drawn from life. And now, my dear young lady, it seems to me I have written here far too much about myself, a fault to which, believe me, I am not addicted. Like Kipling I believe in the potency of the Evil Eye where the personal pronoun is concerned, but you asked for it, and if any of this helps you towards your M.A. I shall feel rewarded for the risk. Please return the enclosed printed matter when you have finished with it, and if you have a spare copy of your thesis I should like to have it. Sincerely, Miss Edith Rogers, Springhill,N.S. |
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3. "My First Novel" was broadcast by CBC Radio on 16 Dec. 1953 in the Wednesday Night series.
23. Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told (New York & London: Harper, 1920).