PW: Jane Urquhart: Writing For Art's Sake

It's true that Tony, a respected painter and sculptor, also likes to draw graveyards. It is also true that Jane Urquhart, the author of four novels that delve into the world of art and ideas, the Victorian age and doomed love, appreciates a good party. Tall and willowy, with long blonde hair, a romantic, almost ethereal beauty, a straightforward manner and lively wit, she nevertheless describes herself as a domestic creature obsessed by houses and requiring the contemplative pleasures of country solitude.

PW caught up with Urquhart in Toronto, where she appeared at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors before leaving for the U.S. and Germany to promote her recent novel, The Underpainter, just out from Viking (PW Forecasts Aug. 4). Currently on Canadian bestseller lists, it has just received the prestigious Governor General's Award for fiction.

The Underpainter is a portrait of an American minimalist painter named Austin Fraser, an emotionally cold and distant man who, at age 75, recounts the story of his life. Born in Rochester in 1894, he tells us about his work, and the two people whom he casually and coldly betrays. One is his model and mistress, Sara, his companion during his annual sketching trips to the Canadian wilderness north of Lake Superior. The other is his friend George, whom he met as a youth in a small Ontario resort town across the lake from Rochester, a town very much like the one inhabited by Urquhart's relatives and where she still spends her summers.

Through Austin's account of George, we glimpse the horrors of WWI and its ensuing tragedies. Especially poignant is George's affair with Augusta, a nurse who returns from the war suffering from shell shock. But there is also George's unrequited love for Vivian, who leaves him abruptly. When Fraser carelessly brings Vivian to see George after a long absence, George's fragile world is shattered.

As in her two earlier novels, The Whirlpool and Away, Urquhart draws on recovered letters, diaries and local histories. "I knew WWI would be part of the book," she says. "Then one day my cousin appeared at my door with a package of 32 letters she found at a garage sale. They were from a First World War nurse to her lover who lived in a small Ontario town and ran a china hall. She knew they were destined for me. They were heartbreakingly sad letters."

The idea behind Fraser's paintings was less tangible. Fraser's canvasses are known as "erasures." After painstakingly creating the ground, he then applies layers of paint to blur, obscure and obliterate the images. This, Urquhart explains, is "the opposite of what an underpainter in Renaissance art d s.""I don't know where he came from," Urquhart says, emphasizing that Austin in no way resembles her husband. "Tony's paintings are organic, he is known as a landscape painter. And his temperament is one of enormous good nature. The character of Austin is a construct. I think a kind of negative animus exists in all of us and I was able to tap into that. You can withdraw from life so much that you damage others and yourself. I was trying to explore that through him."

Like such Canadian novelists as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels, Urquhart first gained attention as a p t. Her earliest publications in the late 1970s were in small distinguished literary journals. "My very first acceptance was from Fiddlehead magazine, which sent me $10. It was tremendously reinforcing. I haven't had the same feeling of excitement about publication since."

In 1984, she submitted an early draft of The Whirlpool to the Seal $50,000 First Novel contest, established by Canada's legendary publisher Jack McClelland and Bantam Books to attract commercial novels for Seal, a Canadian mass market paperback venture. Although The Whirlpool was chosen as one of five finalists, it didn't win. But something equally fortuitous occurred. The novel was read by Ellen Seligman, McClelland &Stewart's esteemed fiction editor.

"She called me and told me she thought it was brilliant," Urquhart enthuses. "She suggested that we meet and talk, even though she couldn't guarantee anything. The Whirlpool had been a smaller book than it is now and she suggested where I might develop it. She promised to call me in three months to see how I was doing. And she did!"

In The Whirlpool, Maud Grady, an undertaker's widow, is obsessed with nameless bodies fished from the river near Niagara Falls. Other characters drawn into the whirlpool beneath the falls are an army historian, his wife, and a doomed p t. Maud was inspired by Tony Urquhart's grandmother who kept her "little floaters book" in which she documented the personal effects found on unidentified bodies pulled from the Niagara River.

The Whirlpool was championed by writers such as Alberto Manguel and Timothy Findley and gradually acquired an international readership, receiving the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France, as the best foreign-language book of 1992. Storm Glass, a collection of short stories published in 1987 by a small Canadian press, attracted the attention of David Godine, who published The Whirlpool in the U.S. in 1990 and Changing Heaven, a novel about a young Emily Bronte scholar, in 1993.

Northern Trails

Urquhart's novels are charged with myths bubbling up from her mother's large tribal Irish family, the Quinns. This is especially true of Away, which chronicled a family of Irish immigrants to Canada in the 1840s. Away won Canada's Trillium Prize and remained on bestseller lists for two and a half years.

Urquhart's work also retains the texture of the different areas of Ontario where she has lived. She was born in Little Long Lac, a remote region north of Lake Superior in 1949. Her father, Nick Carter, who died in September at age 88, was a mining engineer and gold prospector. When Jane was five or six, he moved the family, which included Jane's two older brothers, to a comfortable middle-class neighborhood in Toronto. But Nick was a gregarious raconteur who brought home the lore of the north with tales of characters like Coffee Annie, Pipe-Fitter Slim and Broken-Leg Bill.

Jane Urquhart's love for theater began with a trip to New York at age eight or nine to see My Fair Lady and The Music Man, an event she recollects with her wonder undiminished. Later in Toronto, she began to study acting at age 10 with the famed New Play Society run by Dora Mavor Moore, a pioneer in Canadian theater. She performed in a youth choir, took piano lessons and spent a summer at the Banff School of Fine Arts.

When she was 11, dreaming of life on a large stage, Urquhart wrote to Richard Rogers telling him she wanted to run away to Broadway to become a star. She asked Rogers to pick her up at the airport in a month's time. Rogers replied that he would be delighted to meet her at the airport -- when she was 18. "That was no good to me at all. I wanted to be a child star," Urquhart admits.

As an adolescent, Urquhart recalls, "I realized that I could use my imagination in other ways. I began writing p try and I became serious about reading, especially the modernist p ts. I was attracted to work I didn't quite understand. I thought if you read something often enough and carefully enough, a wonderful mystery will be explained to you. I was probably right."

In 1968, when she was 19 and in her first year studying English literature at the University of Guelph in southwestern Ontario, Urquhart met a young art student named Paul Keele. They married six months later. After she graduated, Urquhart went with Keele to Halifax for a year, where he studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and she worked in public relations for the Royal Canadian Navy. "I was still writing p try, but not as seriously, " she recalls. "We were so totally involved with one another-the relationship was a full-time job."

In 1973, they had moved back to the seat of her mother's family, a farm on Lake Ontario east of Toronto, when tragedy struck. Paul Keele was killed in a car crash. One might trace the recurrent theme of doomed love affairs in her novels to this brief, intense marriage.

Following Keele's death, Urquhart, a childless widow of 24, went back to Guelph to study art history. There, she met Tony Urquhart, 15 years her senior and a divorced father of four with full-time custody of two daughters. They married in 1976 and their daughter, Emily, was born in 1977.

Urquhart displays the same talent and energy for managing her literary career that she exhibited as a child. When she decided, with Away, that it was time to leave David Godine and her Canadian agent, Lee Creal, she had Michael Ondaatje arrange an introduction to his New York agent, Ellen Levine. (Ondaatje became a friend of Tony Urquhart through his first wife, artist Kim Ondaatje.) Levine placed Away with Kathryn Court, who continues to be her American editor at Viking, and brought Urquhart to the attention of Liz Calder at Bloomsbury and Arnulf Conradi at Berlin Verlag.

Urquhart has cast Levine as her fairy godmother, transforming the author/agent relationship into a whimsical costume drama. Every time one of Urquhart's books reached a milestone, such as a new contract or a foreign rights sale, Urquhart mailed Levine a new article for her fairy godmother wardrobe.

"The first piece of the outfit was a wand with streamers," says Levine, a businesslike woman who is better known for her acumen and tenacity on the part of her clients than her potential as a fairytale character. "Later, a tiara arrived. The next time, she made me a dress, a blue, satiny fairy godmother gown. The last time, she wrote, saying 'you've earned your wings.' And she sent a pair of silvery pink colored wings. Every time I look at them, I feel good."

Urquhart's growing recognition as one of Canada's leading novelists comes as the author attempts to take her fiction in a somewhat new direction. With The Underpainter, she says, "I pushed myself in ways I hadn't before. I was tougher, meaner. This is not a heartwarming story. I had to restrain myself in terms of language. I was able to use a visual intensity, but I couldn't become overly lyrical. I was writing in the voice of an American."

If Urquhart is part of a tradition or a school of writers, it is the one identified by Margaret Atwood as Southern Ontario Gothic. Like Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley and, occasionally, Atwood herself, Urquhart's fiction probes delicately beneath the genteel, bland surface of the towns and countryside within 200 miles of Toronto. These writers have found strange, almost bizarre, occurrences, dark forces, sudden death, passionate attachments and the supernatural in commonplace objects, and they have used these elements to create a heightened sense of reality in their fiction.

In chronicling her home territory and delving into its history and its myths, Urquhart notes, "It can't be art without transformation. I'm not interested in recording the perceived world. It is important to me while I'm writing to take some kind of journey from reality." That journey has granted this author, once naively captivated by the transformative powers of art, a much darker understanding of the artistic temperament, and a mature, painterly style most befitting of its subject.
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