Topics
for Discussion
1. “A letter,” observed Emily Dickinson, “always
seemed to me like immortality.” Letters often outlive
the people who write them, providing a valuable record of
daily life, of events rarely preserved by historians. Yet
they are private documents, often intimate, written in unguarded
moments to a particular individual, never intended to be read
by anyone other than the recipient. Discuss the ethics of
reading other people’s mail, even long after they are
dead.
2. How would you describe Joe? Did your impression of his
character change over the course of the book? Was his failure
to make good on his promises to Phyllis a surprise?
3. The relationship that Joe and Phyllis embark on is a dangerous
one for them both. Tobacco, and the comforts it can buy, is
the obvious pay-off for him. But is there more to his interest
in Phyllis than that? And what motivates Phyllis to risk so
much? What role do the letters play in both their lives?
4. Phyllis’s attraction to the convict is not unique:
prison seems to be an aphrodisiac for some women. Discuss
the allure of the ‘bad boy.’
5. How is the revelation of Phyllis’s relationship with
the convict received by her family? Why do they allow it to
continue? Discuss how a family might react to a similar revelation
today. How do you account for the differences?
6. The correspondence that survives may only be a fragment
of what passed between Joe and Phyllis. He may have continued
to write. He may even have visited. Based on what can be gleaned
of Joe’s character from his letters, discuss other possible
endings to this story.
7. Prisons have changed a great deal in the last hundred years,
yet many ex-cons have written to say that their experience
of incarceration was just like Josie’s. Discuss the
nature of loss of freedom and its effect on an individual.
8. To some extent, Josie’s letters are the most fictional
part of the book. He reinvents himself for Phyllis, secure
in the knowledge that she will never find out the truth. Letters
— whether mailed or emailed or hidden in a stone crevice
— allow us to become someone else. Discuss the ways
in which both Phyllis and Joe elaborate on the truth. Compare
their relationship to an email romance today.
9. The term “convict lover” is used only once
in the course of the book, in reference to one of the main
characters. In some ways, though, Phyllis, Josie, and William
St. Pierre Hughes might all be considered convict lovers.
Discuss.
10. The epistolary form of narration is not new to literature,
but it has rarely been used in Canada. How well do the letters
work to reveal character and setting and to further the plot?
How might the book have changed if the letters were used only
in fragments or as background documents in the writing of
a novel about Joe and Phyllis? Would the results have been
as moving?
The author comments:
On historical truth
Choice and chance are the great definers
of history. Phyllis Halliday chose to keep those letters.
When she died, her niece cleaned out the attic, hauling bags
of old papers to the dump. By chance, some were left strewn
across the floorboards. Over the next few years, several people
lived in that house, but none chose to explore the attic,
or if they did, they let it be. By chance, a writer moved
in and on August 8 — Phyllis’s birthday —
she climbed up and found a story.
What we know of the past is so accidental, so dependant on
the whims and desires of both the person who saves a document
and on the person who finds and interprets it, that to put
much store in the “facts” of history seems ludicrous.
Even historians like Simon Schama admit that there is no such
thing as objective history. Everything we know about the past
has been filtered first by the people who lived it and again
by those who try to piece it together again from what is left
behind.
So is, this story of a prisoner and
a village girl true? Yes, in that these people lived and corresponded
in Portsmouth vilage in 1919 and 1920. But did they do so
with the motivations I ascribe to them? I don’t know.
I was rigorous in my research and ruthless in my search for
emotional and factual truth, but in the end, no one can ever
know what was in their hearts.
On the perils of research
What I found in the attic was not a
neat bundle of 79 letters. Hundreds of pages blanketed the
floor, some written by Joe Cleroux but most of them belonging
to other letters and pamphlets, for Phyllis had saved everything.
My first task was to separate out the pages from Joe, then
I had to arrange them into discreet letters. Luckily, because
he’d stolen most of his writing matierals, I was able
to reassemble the letters by comparing the shape of the paper
or the kind of ink or pencil he was using on a particular
day. Run-on sentences helped, too.
It took the better part of a year to
arrange the pages into letters. Then, I had to put them in
chronological order. Only three were dated: Christmas, Easter,
and St. Patrick’s Day. The rest were inscribed not with
the day they were written but with the day Phyllis would find
them in the quarry. However, there were certain internal narratives
that helped to order the letters: the saga of Josie’s
haircut, the anticipated arrival of the new warden. And Joe
often mentioned events in the natural world — the first
robin, a big snowstorm, a thunderstorm in the night. Hoping
to put dates to these happenings, I began to read the local
newspapers. For nine months, from October until July, I spent
every morning at the library, immersed in the Daily British
Whig and the Kingston Standard. I made note of all the weather
reports (including the one time that it rained three Fridays
in a row), every mention of Portsmouth village and the penitentiary.
It was from the newspapers that I learned
about the strike at Canadian Locomotive and the vacancies
in the top staff of the prison. I began to see a context for
the story of Phyllis and Joe. For most of a year, I lived
in the world of post-World War One Canada, avoiding all contemporary
media, to the point that one evening, while at a party, I
exclaimed at the awful plane crash north of the city, and
seeing the blank stares of my friends, it suddenly dawned
on me that I was talking about an accident that had happened
seventy-five years before. To me, it seemed like yesterday.
On
fact and fiction:
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said
it 2,500 years ago: you can't step into the same river twice.
Reality cannot be relived. It can’t even be reconstructed
since the bits and pieces that come to us from the past are
inevitably incomplete. The best you can do is try to recreate
what was.
The letters are real documents. The
rest is imagined, of course, though in recreating the narrative
that weaves the letters together, I kept myself on a very
short leash. If I describe Phyllis wearing a green dress on
a cloudy afternoon, you can be assured she owned a green dress
anad that the sun didn’t shine that day. To try to imagine
the convict’s life, I manacled my hands to a lintel
for hours. I stayed in a room the size of a cell for 40 hours
straight. It was nothing like the real experience of imprisonment,
but it gave me some appreciation of the physical effects,
at least. I learned as much as I could about the place and
the time and the specifics of Josie’s world and Phyllis’s,
then I tried to put the people I knew from their letters and
diaries into those situations. It wasn’t fiction so
much as speculative recreation.
I was often tempted to invent letters from Phyllis, but to
do so, would have thrown the truth of Joe’s letters
into doubt. Which is ironic, since although the letters are
“real,” they are in many way, the most fictional
part of the book. Joe made up the details of his birth, his
family relations, his criminal past out of whole cloth, giving
himself far more license than I gave myself.
When I was writing this book, there were no models, no genre
that it fit into easily. It wasn’t a novel, although
many refer to it as such and it is often shelved in the fiction
section of bookstores. But it wasn’t nonfiction either,
since the thoughts and feelings of the characters are clearly
my invention. I wasn’t willing to falsify the names
in order to make the book fit more comfortably into fiction,
and neither was I willing to forego the narrative to make
it conform to the standards of nonfiction. And so The Convict
Lover rests somewhere along the continuum between fact and
fiction, at a place where stories, though true, can still
be told as stories.
Similar
books to read and compare:
Eduardo Galeano,Walking Words
David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree
Richard Wright, Clara Callan
Margaret Atwood, Alais Grace
