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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Peter Pouncey discusses his first novel, Rules for Old Men Waiting, which took 23 years to write, and was published as he turned 67 years old.
Is it true that this novel was twenty-five years in the making?
Twenty-three
actually. The first part I can remember writing can be dated to early
fall 1981: the story of a boy taking his mother rowing on a lake in the
highlands of Scotland. The boy, as far as I remember, had no name. The
sequel to the rowing in the present book is the same boy taking (and
putting back the next day) a Golden Eagle’s egg from its nest on a
cliff above the lake, which was not written till 1991 at the earliest;
by then he was called MacIver. So it was all a slow evolution and a
complex series of layers and accretions. There was no particular
agitation, or even urgency, about the slow rate of progress. I was
heavily engaged elsewhere at the time, studying the writings of the
ancient historians or being a college dean or president, and I looked
at these escapes into my imagination as a relief and relaxation from
sometimes more stressful preoccupations. In the end, there was a chest
filled with pages to draw on. And when you are two-thirds of a century
old, it is borne in on you that this may be the last chance to complete
what you most wanted to do.
You mentioned your work on the ancient historians. What influence have the classics generally had on your writing?
A
strong influence, beginning with my efforts to master two precise
languages, Latin and Greek. In these heavily inflected languages, (i.e.
they have many cases, extra tenses, moods etc) the form of words is
altered to convey exactly the function that the word plays in
the particular sentence, and one’s attention to each word, to its
ending, to the rhythmic contribution it makes in its context, is a very
good spur to paying attention to one’s own language. In England, we
were schooled from an early age in trying to write in both languages in
prose and poetry, and it was useful. There is no doubt that an only
averagely educated citizen of antiquity would have a more nuanced eye
and ear for how language behaves than his modern counterpart.
When it comes to literature, the biggest influence on me is probably
the historian Thucydides; I first read a chunk of him in Greek for my
English A levels (roughly equivalent to American Advanced Placement
exams). The passage we were responsible for was book II of the Peloponnesian War,
and included the startlingly juxtaposed Funeral Oration and Plague —
the glory of Athens and instant decay, high-flying rhetoric and
depressing fact. I was at once fascinated and troubled by it and still
am. Since then other works have exerted their magic on me, perhaps
Homer and Herodotus most of all.
Could you talk about your experience as a university professor?
It’s
a great profession, especially if and when you get past the impulse to
perform in class. It took me a while: for quite a few years, I was more
preoccupied with enjoying myself and putting on a show, rather than in
having the students actually learn anything. On a good day, I could be
moderately funny. Later, when life had sobered me up a bit, I became
quite absorbed by the students’ progress in learning, spending more
time on their written work and enjoying it. It is a wonderful thing to
be able to see a young person’s mind wake up to an idea and run with
it, and to attend with close concentration to the words on a page and
make them deliver an unseen secret. With that kind of engagement, the
students often teach the teacher, and that is the highest reward you
can be given. MacIver certainly knew all this.
How similar is MacIver’s life and personality to your own?
There
was originally a chronology attached to the book (we scrapped it
because it voided suspense), and I noticed that I gave MacIver my own
birthday. But that may be as far as it goes. He is larger than life and
lacks caution, cutting swathes through situations, too dangerous to be
trusted with the management of any complex mechanism or institution.
I’m not sure I would want to associate with him on a daily basis–he is
a little too large for the room he fills. I think he is a noble old
warrior, though, and I admire him in his honesty, his absence of
self-pity, the immediate passion with which he gives himself to
experience. It would be a mistake to equate his bluntness with any kind
of dullness of mind or spirit.
There is much emphasis on
MacIver’s Scottishness, though he seems to have spent at least half his
life in America. What about his Americanness?
Good
question. He is an American as well. There is no trace of old-country
stuffiness about him; he belongs in a large landscape. He is entirely
democratic about the people he’s interested in–Ben Winterbourne, the
gas attack victim; Bonnie, the check-out girl. Of course, he’s also a
ham, and likes to summon the skirr of the bagpipes with his accent at
strategic social moments. But there was no question of his ever dying
anywhere but in his auld American wooden house, in the auldest part of
America.
Is MacIver’s wife, Margaret, too good for him?
Of course, she is and he knows it, and knows that if he ever attained the
state of grace it was through her gentleness. But she also loves him —
for his honesty and the fact that he is big-hearted as well as
large-framed, and that he is capable of quite delicate insight. And
also, interestingly, she likes his anger, when it is righteous
indignation.
Why does MacIver choose to tell a story for his work?
I think he’s weary of himself. The internal turmoil of grief and
dislocation after Margaret’s death allows him no respite from which to
make sense of his predicament. The story moves his reflections to
neutral ground, as it were, pulls him outside himself, interests him in
a larger world once more, and thus indirectly, by the inferences he
draws, gives him an avenue back to self-knowledge. It was a smart move,
I think
Rules for Old Men Waiting deals largely with wars of the twentieth century. What is your first memory of war?
I have written in a memoir that I’m working on, called The Broken Times,
about coming to myself near the pleasantly peaceful city of Victoria,
British Columbia, on the southern point of Vancouver Island. We had
washed up there, looking across the water at Mount Baker, at the
outbreak of World War II, and were there through the war. It was fine
for us children, but a desperately anxious time for our mother: “Bereft
of her husband incommunicado with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in the
far west of China, of her father and brother in a Japanese interment
camp near Shanghai, and of her own mother in the blitz in London, my
mother listened in the kitchen to the BBC news, hearing the Axis
extending its reach through the world on an ever-widening front. We
three children listened with her in silence, sensing her fear, and
fearing it.”
How do the wars of the twentieth century relate to our times?
There
is no question that the follies of 20th century are the same as our
own. The scale of consequences rises: recently we celebrated 150 years
since the Charge of the Light Brigade. On that day English cavalry
charged the Turkish artillery batteries in the Crimea, and only 195 out
of 600 returned. On the first of July 1916, the first day of the Battle
of the Somme, there were 67,000 British casualties before lunch — waves
of perhaps the finest volunteer force ever assembled sent as infantry
across level ground into the teeth of modern machine guns, some of
whose barrels became red-hot with the ceaseless slaughter they were
dishing out. The pattern is in fact invariably the same: the
generals and politicians almost never know what they are sending their
men into. It was the same with Athens, in the middle of the war that
would destroy her: she decides in 415 BCE to send another expedition to
conquer Sicily. An army of 40,000 prime troops and a fleet of 200 ships
were comprehensively destroyed. Jingoistic slogans seem almost always
to win out over considered thought.
Why does MacIver choose to die alone?
Here
we are on delicate ground. Many animals, including beloved family dogs,
feel they want to go through their last ordeal by themselves, and
withdraw. But that is slightly different. I feel that MacIver is one of
those people who know that, for all their public strutting and
fretting, their real self lies deep within. It’s nothing to do with the
subconscious, or anything like that; in fact, it is the part of them
that thinks and feels most clearly, most quietly, most deeply. It never
lies, so it is the source of their integrity. They are most themselves
when they are in touch with that inner core. So those who know and love
such people recognize the need they have, and leave them time and space
to retire to their private place. I imagine Margaret often let her
husband slip away to his. The Roman philosopher Seneca has a line:
Whenever I go abroad among men, I return home less a man. MacIver and I
may be alike on this: we both feel we do best when we keep to our
private cells. At the end, of course, he had outlived closeness with
all those he had cared for, so his choice to die alone has a kind of
necessity about it.
Ultimately, do you think that your book is depressing?
Not at all, for two reasons. The first is that early in the book
MacIver, after all sorts of shakiness, takes hold of his life again,
and keeps hold of it, with mental and spiritual vigor and bite,
to the very end. We would all want that to be the way we go; MacIver is
very fortunate in his ending. The second reason is the matter of a love
that was almost lost but is found again: the arc, as it were, of love
restored to confidence and ease, from doubt and an impossible loss,
emerges ascendant on the far side of the sinking war narrative, and
rescues the whole from darkness, I believe.
How does it feel to be on the threshold of finally publishing your novel at the age of 67?
It
feels pretty good at this point. But just as you don’t count pages, you
don’t count years either. The fact is I want to complete three more
books–another novel, a memoir, and a translation of Lucretius–and I
hope I shall drive them to conclusion on a rising trajectory of strong
writing. There is a pleasant sense of urgency nudging me on, and
clearly time is a factor. But I’ll take whatever I’m given with
relatively good grace – at least for me.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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