TDR Interview: Harold Hoefle

The Mountain Clinic (Oberon, 2008) is the first book of the occasionally Montreal-based nomad and writer Harold Hoefle. Hoefle is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Nashwaak Review, The Antigonish Review and in the anthologies Lust for Life and Telling Stories. An earlier version of this book won an Honourable Mention for the 2003 David Adams Richards Award, sponsored by the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick.

Hoefle read in Toronto on Nov. 11, 2008 at the Rivoli (7pm), with additional readings by Nathan Whitlock, Rebecca Rosenblum and Michael Bryson.

Interview by Katia Grubisic

[November 2008]

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Harold Hoefle hasn’t even seen his actual book when this conversation begins over email, as we both happen to be reading Ted Hughes’s The Birthday Letters. I ask him about the peculiar paradoxical erasure of the author in any auto- or biographical writing—I am not here! Look at me! He fails to answer. Hoefle is preoccupied, getting ready to move across the country again. This man has long been afflicted or blessed by what they call la bougeotte.

By the time I have bouged across the country myself, the box of books has arrived and our conversation continues on the beach at Cadboro-Gyro Park in Victoria, where Hoefle and I share some wannabe madeleines from the Starbucks up the road. The morning sun is reclining on the shook-foil water. Rocks knife lazily into the bay, and sailboats and seagulls bob companionably. It is windy, and getting cold.

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TDR: The landscape forgives everything, but these madeleines are a bit rough…. Do you think of your writing as Proustian? [NB: The Danforth Review has its tongue shoved very far in its cheek and would like to assert that only trained professionals on a closed course should ever be comparing anything to Proust. Ed.]

HH: Insofar as memory is part of what I’m doing, but for me to compare myself even remotely to Proust [he chuckles] is a bit like a pebble looking at Mount Everest and saying "Brother, how’s it going?"

TDR: There’s the methodical way you set out to catalogue every facet of a situation, albeit happily much more concise than Proust! In this case, you examine the frustrations and restlessness of Walter after the seminal abandonment by the father. Departures for Walter provide glimpses into the self, into nations, provenance—ways to come to terms with that first, primal departure.

HH: Yes; when you leave a place, you end up where no one knows you. You can recreate yourself; you can constantly become the person you want to become. The Mountain Clinic is about this guy who, abandoned by his father, wants to get away from the emotional prison of his house with his mother, and just be where he doesn’t know anybody, where he doesn’t have to think about his own pain. He can just sop up the ephemera and the thoughts and concerns of those around him. He becomes a sort of mobile sponge. He doesn’t have to deal with himself; he can squeeze others.

TDR: Let’s talk about the genesis of the book, and this recently sprung question of genre.

HH: The mother story was the first—"So Long Ago It’s Not True." I’d moved to Nepal, to Kathmandu, in the summer of ‘96. I’d already spent 12 years trying to write. I’d written desultorily, and badly, very badly. And when I got to Nepal I just thought, if I don’t get serious now, I am going to hate myself into an early grave. That’s an extreme statement, but that’s how I felt. And then I sat down to write in this little room in this old Newari house, and the first thing that came out of me was this story about my mother. And then I wrote "Down Time," the mining-town story, a few months later; I had brought to Nepal my notes from my time up-north.

TDR: Although the generic blurring between short story and the novel was an accident of the publication terrain, you very openly blur the lines between fiction and autobiography. When memoir works well, when it’s compelling, the story is privileged over the I. The Mountain Clinic takes memoir to its furthest point insofar as it’s completely fictional. Could you talk about the title, the duality it suggests?

HH: Mark [Jarman, Hoefle’s editor at Oberon] suggested I call it either The Castle of Lies, which is a line in the last story, or The Mountain Clinic. I didn’t even have the word clinic in there, in the last story… The Mountain Clinic brings together an immutable natural force and human frailty, but it’s ambiguous; a clinic can be a place where you go to heal, or a place where you go to learn.

TDR: What did you learn from writing this book?

HH: How hard it is to write something good. How you doubt yourself as to whether it is good. And it does feel momentarily good—to use that word for the third time—to finish something. And then you just think, you have to do something better.

TDR: You wrote a parallel article in Maisonneuve magazine in 2005, "Waiting for My Father," which explored how, or whether, it is possible to replace a parent—with travel, with literature…

HH: Geoff [Cook, a Montréal-area poet and good friend of Hoefle’s] called me out of the blue about four years ago, from a phone booth in downtown Montreal, and—typical, rhetorical Geoff—he says: "I’ve solved your life." Cadenced pause between the words. You have to write, he said, about your father, about Austria, the connection between the two, the psychological problem of Austria and how that’s emblematized in your dad… That was the genesis of the Maisonneuve piece. Then, when I was writing stories with my Walter character, I just kept thinking, I’ve got to write the father story. The father story became a kind of fictionalized combination of what I wrote in Maisonneuve, which was true, and what I made up--how I let myself imagine the father.

TDR: In the magazine article, you talk about pinning your father to a page. You told me earlier that you sat down and wrote the truth. So why not just write The Mountain Clinic as a non-fiction piece entirely? Fiction, as the poet Tim Lilburn sees it, is "untruthful but apt." How does fiction complicate truth? Is it closer to the truth?

HH: Well, there’s emotional and psychological truth, which have their own respective, subjective logic. Was it easier to write the blurred fictional account? It was liberating. I could just think—where is the father going to go? Well, he’s going to go to Montreal. Where’s he going to end up? Pointe-Claire. I’ve walked through Pointe-Claire, and I just thought, he’s going to be there. He’s going to have a mistress, and he’s going to be with that person.

TDR: The Mountain Clinic feels like a succession of moments. The story definitely lies in the verbing, but there are these shifts of consciousness: now we’re going to explore this, now I’m going to go over here and think about this. You’ve shucked the connective tissue we think of as novelistic.

HH: I slowly jettisoned the notion of making one controlling idea the propellant for the piece. I just cleaved ideas out of my brain. I thought: story. How can I tell this story: what’s the setting, how are they going to talk, who’s the character going to be, how does he look, how does he smell, is he drinking, is he smoking, what are the sounds in the room.

TDR: After the preoccupations of sense and plot are written into being, the ideas, or the thematic topography, often become evident in hindsight. Would you say now that this is a book about Walter, or a book about his father?

HH: I don’t even know how to answer that, honestly. The two characters are blurred in a way: what does Walter do? He replicates what his father did; he ends up running away all the time.

TDR: Walter doesn’t quite love his father, nor does he hate him. It’s a reluctant admiration.

HH: The father is heroized early on. What the father does is kind of Romantic, despite the abandonment. And when Walter comes up against the possibility of confronting both the myth and the reality, all he gets is evasion: "I am here to be crazy." Which, to come clean, is a rip-off of what the Swiss writer Robert Walser said when he committed himself to an asylum in Switzerland in 1929. His good writer-friend and editor Carl Seelig came to see him and said, "Robert, are you writing anymore?" And Walser answered, "I’m not here to write. I’m here to be crazy." His narratives are so often about travels. He’s been a kind of natural literary touchstone for me.

TDR: Literary fathers. Literature, as you say in the Maisonneuve non-fiction piece, has become your father.

HH: That statement has a certain sentimental side to it, but when I think of my sources of emotional solace for twenty years, especially the five years I travelled, I was reading all the time. A hundred books a year. I always had a book in my hand; a book was holding my hand.

TDR: The Mountain Clinic never seeks to reverse events, to find ways around the father’s departure. Walter has a complicated empathy for his father, most obviously when the father is given his own stories—the car accident, the mistress—and his own choices. No other character comes close to eliciting that care, not even Walter himself; there is no one constant throughout the book except the absent father. All the secondary characters—the repulsive Uncle Karl, the Czech neighbours in Vancouver, the lovable but difficult Bren working at the mill—are transient.

HH: Walter needs to belong, so wherever he goes, whoever there is to belong to—he gloms on. And if you look at the people he falls in with, they’re all thorny brother or father figures. "Flaco Was Here," one story—one chapter of the novel, I should say—is narrated by an old man, who has a bit of a hate on for Walter early on, but two-thirds of the way through the story is tucking him into a hammock with a blanket and an AK-47.

TDR: There’s always a hiccup of mistrust in the relationships between Walter and these men, a sense of distance. Walter seems to trust more or less whomever he meets, but there is always a dédoublement, a remaining niggling mistrust that is yours as the author, and therefore the reader is held a bit at bay.

HH: I think men need to be with men, and often feel safer with men. I won’t say that’s personally true in my life right now, but for Walter, especially in his twenties, when he’s travelling, it seems to be. Walter is learning the code of male friendship. There are so many moments in that book where it’s just two guys in a room talking. Part of what’s important is that neither man is alone. There’s another person in the room. The women in the book, meanwhile, function mostly as truth-tellers; the men are either unwilling or unable to confront the truth.

TDR: Austria is a big secondary character. Even though it’s only really the setting for the final chapter, Austria is the most concrete, tangible place in this book. Even the BC mining town—it’s gritty, but it feels rendered; it’s kind of a postcard of crappiness.

HH: Others have since said to me, you still have to write the Austria book, where I go into the lunacy of Austria. Think of the guy in the news earlier this year, who imprisoned his own daughter, who impregnated her. I could still write about that world of secrets, but I think Austria’s behind me now. In The Mountain Clinic, it’s partly imagined, partly remembered… Also, I’m sick of writing about young male characters. I’ve written a few pieces with female protagonists. I’m interested in the point of view of women, and old people, especially old men. I’ve danced with young men long enough.

TDR: I’ve seen this book in earlier incarnations, and have thought of it as a collection of linked short stories, as you did too, for a long time—until the end of October, in fact. To what extent is the mountain clinic where the novel ends pivotal? How much of the whole novel is about the madness that we wilfully inhabit in order to make sense of the world?

HH: Or to get refuge from a world that doesn’t make sense. In the clinic, you’re not expected to behave the way that a normal person has to. The asylum, Austria; where we end up or where we come from… The mountain clinic is just another escape. There, you walk to a fence, joke about farmers sticking dynamite up the asses of cows and blowing them up. It’s absurd. Walter starts eating sweet-tasting berries. It’s like a perverted garden of Eden: sweet berries, chain-link fence, cow viscera caught in the fence…

Hoefle gives the impression of trying to come to terms with life’s vagaries, inventing the terms if none fit, but wanting very much to get it right. Several times throughout our conversation, he refers to an ideal, careful reader. "Malcolm Lowry," Hoefle guffaws, "that great drunk, wrote in a letter that a reader shouldn’t expect everything to come up his own personal elevator." A reader just doesn’t get everything put into a text, though one can’t help but hope that readers of The Mountain Clinic will put as much attention into the meticulous deciphering of this world as Hoefle himself has put into creating it.

Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor and translator. She first encountered Harold Hoefle, albeit without knowing it, when both had short stories published in Front & Centre approximately a million years ago.