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Taken from Doris Hillis’ interview with David Carpenter in Plainspeaking: H: I know you love fishing and it has other, deeper connotations for you. Will you explain what it means to you?

C: Yes, it never loses its thrill. I don’t even see it as a sport. I spent a great deal of time learning how to fly-fish and I tie my own flies. When I see a brown trout rising in the stream and I start to cast on this whiplike rod, and the leader is as thin as a spider-web almost, and it slips back and forth and lands upstream . . . . Well, there’s a moment just before the trout rises, if it does rise, that is incomparably thrilling. When the fish does rise and explodes at the surface and grabs your fly, you have succeeded, I suppose, in one of the ultimate arts: with your imitation of life you’ve fooled nature. Suddenly, you’ve connected with the natural world. In fact, just by putting on your waders and walking into a stream you leave your own ecosystem behind and you enter another world that has strange, submerged, mysterious things. It’s just like the human imagination; by throwing the fly out onto the water, you are divining a monster. So to me, fishing is a Kind of entrance into my own childhood mythology of real monsters, real excitement, real tension and I feel tremendous love for these fish. In fact, I think of Drew Edmond as fishing for the memories of his past.

H: What about the Christian overtones?

C: I think you will find Christian symoblism throughout my writing, but it’s not particularly conscious. In this society, we use a certain Christian ritualistic language to baptise a baby, in the marriage ceremony we use it, and we go out of this world the same way, with the same language. Much as I have attempted to deny my Christian origins at various times in my life, it’s there, part of my personal mythology.

So when a huge, threatening fish comes up from the bottom of a dark lake, for instance, and it’s called Luce, I can’t avoid the similarity to Lucifer. It has a Satanic aspect. It’s a jackfish, but it also stirs up another kind of mythology. There’s an air of evil and transgression. I suppose you could see the opposite tendency in Jewels, but there’s also a kind of Christian mythology there too. I think that’s why I eventually became interested in Milton, and in a world that is no longer viable: where if you are a bad man you go down to hell, and if you’re good you rise to heaven.

H: Have you accepted any particular belief?

C: I guess that for some time now I’ve been a Christian. It’s true I’m not comfortable in churches but I can’t seem to escape the fact that I have Christian instinct. I’m forever linked to an old-fashioned Christian morality. I’ve fought against this very hard and I’ve despaired over it, and I’ve argued with religious people.

I think, probably, if I had to describe my particular religion, I would include mysticism, where, I guess, things are not as they seem. There is a numinous quality to life that shows through once in a while, where ordinary things reveal something holy and mystical and quite wonderful. In my writing, I’m occasionally aware that something else is going on beneath the very boring and ordinary surface. Some of my stories drive towards an epiphany, and this has to include spiritual awakening.

That’s the way I’ve seen things throughout my life. Once in a while I’ll have a very cranky day and then I’ll have a strange dream, or I’ll be off in the woods somewhere and an overhwelmingly powerful feeling will inhabit me. You’ll notice when it comes to talking about my spiritual beliefs, I find it difficult to do, because you have to move from ordinary discourse into a language I’m not comfortable with.

H: Some of your characters have unconventional lifestyles. Have your own ideas been influenced by the social changes that have occurred since the sixties, changes that have made one’s lifestyle much more a matter of personal choice?

C: I didn’t know I wrote about lifestyle. The world “lifestyle” is not in my vocabulary. It’s just a word that I never use. I suppose it’s certainly fair to say that my characters inhabit a world that is recent and to say that some inhabit a pretty unconventional world. Each story is about a different person and takes you into a different room of the house, if I can speak metaphorically. What I find most interesting about my characters, and my friends, is not that they’ve managed to adhere to a certain orthodoxy but that they have lived on the edge, in one way or another.

Because I’m from the middle class, because I grew up in security, I’m threatened by that security. I’m threatened by the complacency that a well-protected life endows a person with. Perhaps I have great potential to become complacent myself. The people I find most interesting are people whose jobs are threatened, whose lives have been deflected by an unfortunate accident, people who have been forced to look much more deeply at life, because it has wounded them in some way.

H: Your stories deal with a whole spectrum of human relationships in a wide open way. I like that.

C: I suppose I’m fully conscious of some things I choose to write about but other things come through because they are part of the picture. For instance, my story “Protection” is about various kinds of protection people gather around them to make life secure and bearable. I’m not all that immersed in Judaism, but the fact that some of my characters in this story are Jewish seems to create interesting tensions. People say I show evidence of philo-Semitism. That probably isn’t true. What is interesting to me is that some of my characters are relegated to the edge of the establishment (and this is true of other stories, too) for reasons of religion, birth, origin or some kind of accident that’s happened to them. I can’t imagine writing a story about people who don’t have any problems.

H: I notice in “Protection” you have used the character Drew Edmond again-the young boy in “Luce”. You do this quite often; the same characters reappear in later stories and novellas. Your work is unified by a web of relationships. This must be a conscious technique.

C: Yes, it is. I have set and definite ideas about each story. But I also have a lot of trouble throwing a net over my characters, saying their life ends with this story. Because, you see, after a story’s been written, I sometimes have a feeling I’ll be talking (for example) to Drew again. I’ve watched Drew’s marriage progress and Drew and Rachel mature, and I don’t think I’m finished with Drew. I’m tremendously fond of Gunnar Held also. I may see Gunnar again. Who knows?

H: As I read your work, I find myself looking for certain characters to reappear.

C: Maybe what I’m writing is one very long book in which all those characters intermingle. If you read Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, you’ll find it’s a huge world-it’s one book, a novel you might say-but it’s really a bunch of stories mingling, and the characters keep coming back.

H: I thought your depiction of teenage boys, and your portrayal of the Jewish milieu and anti-Jewish prejudice in “Protection” were especially good. At the conclusion, you seem to be saying that the eradication of deeply-ingrained prejudice is almost impossible.

C: Before World War II, anti-Semitism in Canada was flagrant. But after the horror of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism went underground, ascribed to people with severely anti-social disorders. I think it still lies below the surface. I see prejudice as a perpetual possibility. The best we can do, as human beings, is to make sure the pre-conditions for racial hatred are not given credibility. For this reason, my politics are a little left of centre.

H: Has your writing led you to analyze your own attitudes towards personal assessment and self-discovery?

C: Very definitely. I see my writing as a serious exploration of character. I explore what it would be like to be this or that person. But I’m quite aware that I’m in all my characters. There’s part of me in Drew Edmond. That character is closer to me than any other I’ve created. Yet, I also see part of myself in Julian Fairfax, the librarian, in Ham Warmsley, the alcoholic music teacher, in Brenda Lumm, in Desmond Oglethorpe. In the short stories, I feel particularly close to some of the characters in “The Elevator”-both the woman and the hockey player-and I’m tremendously close, at times, to Michael Piggot in “God’s Bedfellows”, and I’m like Howie, when I’m in a sharp-tongued kind of mood.

Guy Vanderhaeghe said something once I found quite interesting, in this regard. He said that basically he sits at home, writes and takes care of his health. He tries to finish what he starts, tries to make his stories as good as he can make them. He says all these characters he’s created are people he might have been, had he had the guts to become them. And I think a lot of my characters are little bits of David Carpenter who will never come to the surface. I’d rather imagine these characters than be them . . . and that’s what makes me into a rather ordinary, dull guy.

From Plainspeaking: Interviews with Saskatchewan Writers by Doris Hillis. Regina: Coteau, 1988. pp. 152-157
Used by permission.

read a passage from Carpenter’s latest novel, Banjo Lessons
read a biographical article
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