A Way With Words
Wellington writer and teacher Kate Duignan explains why her second novel has arrived 17 years after her debut.
Kate Duignan explains why her second novel arrived 17 years after her debut.
Ah, that difficult second novel. Marilynne Robinson had almost a quarter-century between Housekeeping and Gilead. “I’m dependent on the emergence of a voice,” she has said. “I can’t make them, they have to come to me. There’s no point in my worrying about it.”
Such serenity. I believe she was truly like this, too. Robinson seems to be that kind of person. There have been 17 years between my first and second novels. I would love to say I waited graciously until a voice emerged, and didn’t worry, but that would be a lie.
I started writing The New Ships in July, 2001. I was 27. Breakwater was just out, and I should have been elated, but I’d gone through a breakup, and I wasn’t. I read Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, about a widowed judge.
September 11 happened. Grief was in the world, and on my mind. I wrote scenes set after a funeral, in Tóibínaspiring sentences. I quite liked them, but I couldn’t see how I would get through a whole novel that way.
I was given a lump of money from an American supporter of the International Institute of Modern Letters. I moved to Edinburgh, where I waited on tables, wore a sheepskin coat, read Russian books and ate tomato soup.
Apparently, I needed to live the full cliché. I wrote and rewrote. I made the arbitrary decision to copy Shakespeare’s Pericles, opening the book with a child born at sea and ending it in Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos. I travelled to Amsterdam to study houseboats, flew to the island.
In the mania of blue Scottish summer nights, ideas multiplied relentlessly: I read about the Angry Brigade, Orpheus, Mozart’s Requiem, Marc Chagall, postnatal depression and sailing. The novel grew confused and it had no ending. By winter, I’d spent all the money and I went home.
Then there were fellowships and teacher training, backpacking trips and love affairs. There was an unexpected pregnancy that brought my partner and me into a life together. That baby came, and then another. Suddenly, I was 39. In all that time I had neither been able to give up on the book nor to finish it.
I was teaching fiction, and the sense of fraudulence became intolerable. I enrolled for a PhD in creative writing and rode on the faith of other people. There was a third baby.
In the end, the book took another five years. When I finally understood how to finish it, I drafted the second half in a great rush, a few months.
That pervasive sense of stuckness is inside Peter, my narrator. In Driving to Treblinka, Diana Wichtel writes of her ambivalence in setting out to look for her father. Obsession over a missing family member, she says, doesn’t necessarily translate to action, because of the terrible risks in what you might find out.
This is precisely Peter’s state: he can’t act, but he can’t stop thinking about it either. There’s been some solace for me in seeing that. It’s as though all the worrying got put to use, one way or another.
THE NEW SHIPS, by Kate Duignan (Victoria University Press, $30) is out now. Duignan is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival on May 19.
In Edinburgh, I waited on tables, wore a sheepskin coat, read Russian books and ate tomato soup.