Questions and Answers

I was asked these questions by bookclubs.ca in August 2007.

1. Mary, what was it about the historical characters of John Donne and his family that inspired you to bring them to life in the pages of Conceit?

I’ve been fascinated by John Donne ever since I discovered his love poetry when I was seventeen. I think every woman who reads his poems wonders what it would have been like to have him as a lover. How could even a well-bred teenager like Ann have withstood such a passionate assault? When I began to write Conceit in 2000, I read Donne’s poems again and again, trying to piece together the story of their courtship. It’s tempting to think that most of the poems were written for Ann, but many seem to have been written before they met, for women that he called his “mistresses”.

Donne tells us that their rash elopement ruined his career. He complained famously, “John Donne. Ann Donne. Undone.” How did Ann feel? Like Juliet’s father, Sir George More was furious. Ann and her poet were exiled to a country cottage, where she bore a child a year. Unable to find a patron or a suitable position, Donne became more frustrated and restless, until he had no option but to take orders.

The poetic promises he had made to Ann must have seemed to her like religious vows. When Donne became a priest, her feeling of betrayal must have been acute. That insight gave me the key to Ann’s character. History doesn’t tell us what Ann thought. Her voice does not survive. The only record we have of her is in words written by her husband and male relatives.

Ann died in her twelfth childbirth, at the age of thirty-three. Donne vowed never to remarry, and raised their seven surviving children by himself. He rose to become Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Thinking of Donne as a single parent humanized him for me. I wanted to get inside that household, to learn what his children thought when they unearthed their father’s erotic poetry. What would it have been like to be the motherless Pegge, a girl who (or so I imagined) had been educated like a boy and had an obsessive curiosity about her father’s love-life? I imagined her trying to order his poems to piece together her parents’ story, taking her mother’s part, as I had done.

2. Describe the research process for the book. What do you feel was the biggest challenge in transitioning characters from history into fiction?

My research for Conceit was hit and miss, more of a process of discovery than an organized assault on catalogues and books. I immersed myself in first person accounts written in the 17th century. A day in the library might net me one minuscule thing, such as the fact that English caterpillars can have purple foreheads and red spots.

The biggest challenge was to free imagination from reality, to follow the golden ball into the forest. I had to liberate the characters from the historical record, to say “this is my John Donne, my Izaak Walton.” I needed to let the characters talk to one another, to let the facts rub together and breed.

We know quite a bit about John Donne, much more than we do about his contemporary Shakespeare. We know that he wrote love poems like a priest and holy poems like a lover, we know that he dressed up in his shroud to have himself sketched for his effigy, but we don’t know why he was smiling so oddly.

I was filling up journals with ideas about the Donne family, but I didn’t know where to start until, when visiting London, I had a dream about the Great Fire and saw Pegge trying to save her father’s grinning effigy from the flames. Why was she risking her life to save a marble statue? Was she rescuing or stealing it? Once the effigy was carted out of Paul’s Cathedral, I had to follow it, both backwards and forwards in time. My first sighting of Pegge was as an eight-year-old running across the Fleet bridge in pursuit of Izaak Walton. Where did Walton come from?—something to do with the pollution of the Fleet river. On it went, one question tumbling after another. New characters arrived in the form of phrases or images, and I raced to get them down. It would take me years to find out how they all fitted together into a single narrative.

3. Conceit is a novel that plunges into the intensity and imperfections of love: erotic love, familial love, platonic love, unrequited love, and first love. Arguably the most powerful and all-consuming is erotic love. But instead of focusing only on John and Ann’s passion, you delve into Pegge’s imperfect relationships with Walton, William, and her own father. Why did you choose Pegge’s journey as the one to pursue? Do you feel you’ve learned anything about love in the process?

The real world doesn’t welcome the extraordinary passion of Romeo and Juliet, or John and Ann. It almost seems to want to stamp it out. Their love-marriage is at the heart of Conceit, but I was even more interested in how it affected their children. Would knowing about their parents’ love make the children’s lives more meaningful, or meaningless in comparison? How could the boys compete with Donne’s famed manhood? How could the girls find such fabled lovers as their father?

Pegge was the most intriguing because I never knew what she would do next. Her story kept opening out. Why was she infatuated with Izaak Walton? “Fish made her think of love”—her mind yoked bizarre things together. Pegge’s desperate attempts to pry the secrets of love from her father led me to Ann, and Ann’s story doubled back on Pegge.

What surprised me most was her relationship with William which kept deepening as the novel progressed, growing into something extraordinary in its ordinariness. I have a soft spot for William because he is always longing for tenderness and struggling to understand his wife. He was originally going to be a minor figure, but he kept turning up, trying to make sense of things, a bit like me I guess.

Exploring the lives of so many people, I have come to believe that there is more to love than any one of us can fathom. All the love stories we read converge into a single storyline—since it’s really our own yearnings that we are trying to satisfy. Conceit is an ensemble love story, and as the 17th century closes, I would like to think that some couples—maybe Samuel Pepys and Elizabeth, or Pegge and William, perhaps even Franny and Mr Bispham—have learned more about the rewards of human intimacy.

4. Pegge is a unique character in many ways, particularly in her attitude towards social conventions and how she chooses to operate within them. How much of her character did you create from whole cloth? Do you believe a woman like Pegge could have existed in the 17th century?

Margaret—Pegge—interested me more than Donne’s other children because so few facts are known about her. She is almost totally fictional. Donne mentions her only twice. In a letter written when she was fifteen, he says “Pegge has the pox.” These words rang in my ears, demanding a place in my novel. I loved his pet name for her and wondered whether the pox had scarred her and spoilt her marriage prospects.

In those days, marriages were considered too important to be left to chance, and most young couples understood this. If they loathed someone they could object, but few would have dared to oppose their fathers. Taking mistresses and lovers was a common solution to the lack of love within wedlock.

In Conceit, Donne’s other daughters encourage their father to find them husbands. Desperate for the kind of love her parents had, Pegge swims against the current. Well-educated, hopeful of putting her intelligence to use in life, she would have felt betrayed when her father changed his mind and tried to arrange a marriage for her.

We are romantics, and find arranged marriages abhorrent, but Donne was acting as a loving father trying to fix his boys in careers and marry his daughters into plentiful fortunes. I believe human behaviour is more restricted today than it was in the 17th century. Life was raw. Death was always near, so was prejudice, hatred of foreigners, war, public hangings, poisonings. Men pissed in the corners of rooms. Language itself was more ingenious and colourful, as Donne’s dramatic phrasings show us.

We know that some very unusual women existed at the time, like the Duchess of Newcastle, who put her footmen into velvet, but dressed outlandishly herself and wrote very odd books and plays. And with a bloodline coming down from John Donne and Ann More--how could Pegge have been conventional and dull?

5. Nature, and the interaction of characters with it, is beautifully interwoven into the story: Pegge’s garden, Walton as angler, William’s fascination with colour, and John Donne’s famous flea, to name just a few. Why is this interaction important? Do you feel in our modern world that these relationships suffer and how so?

These connections to nature came up gradually in the writing, so I’m surprised to see how many there are in the finished book. You might be right in suspecting some sort of theme at work.

Yes, we’ve lost some of our sensitivity to the natural world, yet so much of value in our lives is in our relationship to plants and animals. Today children are taught to recycle, but not allowed to lie down alone in a field of barley and stare aimlessly at the clouds.

In writing Conceit, I reconnected to the world of my childhood, when I ran barefoot beyond the circle of adults. I grew up in a rural area of Victoria, and felt very close to the older world of my English grandparents. My father was an amateur naturalist. Once he brought home a dead mole with a strange pink nose. I was allowed to take it to school the next day to show it off.

When my writing stalls, I look out my office window into a green belt and listen to one of the streams in the MacKay creek watershed. I go for walks to feed my muse. Now that I have a two-year-old grandson, we stop to inspect things along the path. He has a particular fondness for insects at the moment. I want to teach him the things I learned from my parents and grandparents, really useful things such as how to make a whistle from a reed and how to peel apples for pie. I still remember my delight when my grandmother held up the long, unbroken ribbon of peel, then let me eat it.

6. John Donne rose to be one of the most popular preachers of the era, particularly during the reign of Charles I. He was known for his elaborate metaphors, powerful religious symbolism, and quick wit. In Conceit, you expertly capture the essence of this public man and at the same time give voice to his private struggles. Was he a difficult character to create? What was the process you engaged in to write such a convincing portrait?

To us Donne seems a peculiar man—a titan of peculiarity!—yet he was revered by people like Izaak Walton, who was totally under Donne’s spell. Donne was an absolute gift to me as a novelist.

One of the macabre details about Donne is that, when he was dying, he dressed up in a shroud to model for his effigy in St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a pretty serious guy, but he seems eccentric to us. So I went into the eccentricity—the baroque language, the metaphysical themes, the quirkiness. That language gave me the rhythm that carried me through the first draft. Eventually it became too intoxicating, and I had to wean myself from it to move on to Ann.

Donne was the easiest character to create because he pretty much wrote himself. I had so immersed myself in his poetry and prose that he sprang to life. I went around talking and thinking like John Donne for the better part of a year. Something in me really resisted switching to Ann’s point of view. When I took a workshop with Thomas Wharton—I remember we were sitting on the lawn at Green College at the University of BC at the time—I was so reluctant that he finally stood up and shouted at me, “If you don’t write about Ann, I will!” That scared the pants off me because Thomas is such a good novelist.

The first stage of getting ideas down is always the most exciting, because I never know what is going to show up. I keep a notebook beside my bed and wake at night to scribble frantically. In the morning, I look at my messy notes and have a devil of a time deciphering them. It happens to me when I get behind the wheel of a car also. I start woolgathering and have to pull over to the curb to get it down. On good days, it takes forever to get across town. Bathtubs are a good place too, though the ink runs and makes the notes even harder to read.

7. Like Pegge, you also grew up in a large family. What is it about the dynamics of large families that interests you? How much of your own family life is mirrored in the pages of Conceit?

Like most fiction-writers, I’m not averse to pinching things, and what better place to pinch from than human nature? I don’t think that humans have changed in the essentials down through the centuries. Their desires, needs, disappointments must have been the same in the 17th century as now. I didn’t draw on my family specifically, but I do admit that I was intensely curious about what went on in the Donne household.

The anecdotes we have about Donne come from an early biography that made a saint of him, but everything that I imagined about him disputed that notion. No man is a hero to his own children—or to a novelist! I knew from my childhood that such a house would have been hectic and noisy. All those bedrooms with closed doors, sounds in the night, people dressing and undressing. There must have been friction—doors slamming, arguments, children sneaking up and hitting one another with pillows. How could Donne have got any work done in such an environment? Family dinners would have been chaotic. Sternness would have been his only weapon.

We know that Donne wanted to settle his sons in careers and arrange secure marriages for his daughters. How did the children feel about his plans? Would they have ganged up against him, or divided into factions? Which of the playful rivalries grew dangerous as they grew older? I wanted to know everything about that house—the servants, what the dog liked to sniff, even where the Dean hung his hat and cloak. What did he see when he looked in the mirror in his library, and what was the mirror doing there in the first place?

8. In your acknowledgments, you note the writers that inspired you while writing Conceit, including John Donne himself. What writers inspire you generally? Which ones have been most influential in your own writing? What is on your bedside table right now?

In one way or another, I’m always drawing on my background in literature, and enjoy dipping into works from previous centuries. If I had to pick one book to take to a desert island it would be Jane Austen’s Emma.

I’ve also been influenced by Canadian writers like Margaret Laurence, Sheila Watson, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Audrey Thomas, and Michael Ondaatje. I love big comic novels that take risks like Mordecai Richler’s St Urbain’s Horseman and Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers. I like to read historical writers such as Michelle de Kretser and Rose Tremain, and try to keep up with contemporary Canadian novelists. On my bedside table at the moment are Shaena Lambert’s Radiance, Peter Behrens’ The Law of Dreams, and Ondaatje’s Divisadero. I’ve been looking forward to them for so long, it’s going to be hard deciding which one to read first.

9. You’re a member of the BC writers’ group, SPiN. Can you describe how the group works? What do you feel are the most significant contributions the group has made to your writing life?

June Hutton, Jen Sookfong Lee, and I met in a novelists’ workshop five years ago—our website www.spinwrites.com tells the story. In the early years, we critiqued our novels in person and on a web forum, which we still chat on daily. Now that we have publishers, we have evolved into a skookum support group. Writing is a lonely occupation and the group gives us the camaraderie we need to keep going even when things get tough, as they still do from time to time. We do events together and meet monthly in one another’s houses—great long meetings full of laughter and tears and celebration. We all have supportive husbands and great editors, but this is one place where we can talk writing writing writing and not bore anyone, even for a second.

10. What are the most rewarding aspects of having your debut novel published? What is your next project?

I’m currently writing a novel set in 18th-century England, but it’s still too early to say more than that. I had been working on Conceit for several years before I felt comfortable telling people about the story.

Conceit was seven years in the making, so when I held the finished book in my hands for the first time I was deliriously happy. Now that I’ve calmed down, I am enjoying hearing what readers think of Pegge, Donne, Ann, Walton, and William. To learn that my fictional characters have come alive for others—that’s such an amazing rush for a writer. At www.marynovik.com, I have an area for visitors’ comments and a 17th-century backgrounds page that visitors can contribute to. I hope that readers of Conceit will drop in, stay a while, and join the conversation. Until then!—Mary.