PERSISTENT
Novelist’s creation comes to life after many rejections and rewrites
Refuge Merilyn Simonds ECW Press Her name was Cassandra MacCallum. She was a feisty 96 and she would not be going gently into the night.
She had arrived urgently in the mind of bestselling Canadian writer Merilyn Simonds, who knew there was a book there. It took, however, 14 often despairing years before Simonds could make it happen.
“I feel that I’m a slow writer,” Simonds confesses with a laugh. But she didn’t expect the gestation period for her new novel, Refuge, to last as long as it did.
The book, now published, comes preceded by advance raves from such award-winning writers as Elizabeth Hay (“a silk scarf of a novel”) and John Vaillant (a “whirling journey through the 20th century”). But there was a time when Simonds, 69, wondered whether it would ever see the light of day.
“Cassandra’s voice came to me, but it took me forever to learn how to tell her story,” she says.
To be sure, the first page of the novel remains essentially the same as what she scribbled in her journal more than a decade ago. Those notes provided Simonds with her opening situation of 96-year-old Cass defying time’s relentless march in the sanctuary of a cabin on an island in Eastern Ontario’s lake country, only to have her equilibrium disrupted by the arrival of a young Burmese woman who claims to be the granddaughter of Cass’s long-lost son.
From there, Simonds envisaged a panoramic memory piece chronicling the extraordinary course of a seemingly ordinary life.
“That first page pretty much came to me as it is now,” Simonds says. “Cass’s character didn’t change — not where she was, not her situation. What has changed is the way I tell her story and get it onto the page.”
It took her four years to produce her initial manuscript, and when it went off to her editors at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto and W.W, Norton in the United States, Simonds assumed it would be welcomed with open arms as another bestseller, similar to her earlier non-fiction success, The Convict Lover.
Instead, it was rejected — not only by these publishers, but by others who later looked at it.
“It’s not a novel,” McClelland and Stewart’s fabled editor, Ellen Seligman, had told her bluntly. That basically was the message Simonds received from other publishers as well, although there were plenty of suggestions for how to fix it: Change the character focus, extend the chapters set in Mexico and New York, make it more of a love story.
Simonds was devastated. Having already done some 15 drafts at this point, she decided it was time to move on to fresh pursuits. She wrote other books, started a literary festival, launched a book column in her local newspaper and started a gardening blog.
But the failure of Refuge continued to nag at her. At the same time, she remained trapped in this “idée fixe” that there was no other way of telling this story of Cass’s life.
Her breakthrough came in 2012 when, over a cup of coffee at a writers’ conference, she raised her problem to a colleague. The colleague, an established writer, listened to Simonds start outlining the plot — and interrupted.
“Stop!” she said, “This is like being on a bus and someone sits down beside you and opens their photo album and says — this is a picture of me in Paris, this is a picture of me in London. In 10 seconds you want to slit your wrists.”
Simonds was told she needed “a shish-kebab rod” on which to hang her stories.
This was when she realized she needed a story that moved back forth in time with past and present working contrapuntally. She needed a “mosaic” effect.
“As a writer, your head is so locked into the structure you first come up with,” she says on the phone from her Kingston, Ont., home.
“I had this linear chronological structure — and why we have to think that our first idea is always the best one is beyond me.”
So she had to “reassemble” the bits and pieces of her narrative — and do a fair amount of rewriting to make it work.
“What I finally realized was that this is Cassandra telling the story — insistently all the way through — and our memories don’t necessarily work in a chronological way,” she says.
After three years she had a final draft — her 22nd. And it quickly found a publisher.
Refuge offers an integrated tableau of dramatic snapshots of a century in which one woman’s unusual life interconnects with war, culture, scientific discovery, the plight of the refugee and the fragility of love.
Real-life characters — among them artist Frida Kahlo and forgotten Canadian polio researcher Maurice Brodie — blend seamlessly into the fictional narrative. And the formidable linkage is provided by the presence of Cass, from childhood to old age, in all her stubbornness, resilience, vulnerability and fallibility.
On the surface, there’s nothing glamorous about Cass. She’s not the stuff of romantic fantasy. She has trained as a nurse — and some of the book’s most compelling pages deal with a polio epidemic. She has a scientific curiosity instilled in her by the father she adored. Photography fascinates her because of what it can tell her about the world. But even she, indomitable though she may be, proves to have no armour against loss and grief.
“I’m interested in ordinary people who are extraordinary in their own hearts, but who labour through their lives in these ordinary jobs,” Simonds says. She comes from a family of nurses — “I own three generations of nursing textbooks!” — and she enjoyed writing about an often unheralded profession.
“I have always loved older women. I have always had an older woman in my life. I just wanted to bring Cass to life. I just wanted to make her breathe on the page. I couldn’t let it alone because I wanted other people to get to know her.”