Patricia Rae is former Head of the Department of English at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ontario. Her broad research interests include literary modernism, modernBritish and American poetry, and early twentieth-century philosophy and psychol-ogy. She is the author of The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (Bucknell UP, 1997) and of articles in English Literary History, Compar-ative Literature, Prose Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Analecta Husserliana, and English Studies in Canada. She is completing a study of George Orwell and modernism, and editing a collection of essays of modernism and mourning.

PD: I'm really happy that you've agreed to be one of our first interview subjects on the topic of women reading. As an academic who reads professionally, do you draw distinctions between professional reading and pleasure reading? Are there such distinctions for us, in the academy?

PR: Well, I think there are, but I suppose I could say it gets harder and harder simply to do pleasure reading. Though I must add that my ideal moment is probably one that happens in the hammock in the Caribbean ... after I've submitted my marks, and I can read a novel knowing that I don't have to teach it. I don't have to think about how to teach it. So that's pleasure reading. But what I've found is that I've often ended up teaching books that I've read in those wonderful circumstances because they became a part of me ... because I wasn't worrying about how I was going to teach them.

PD: You were just enjoying them.

PR: That's right, and so my copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls has sand in it, ... (laughter) and I've taught it about five times now. But because I swallowed it whole, it became a part of me and so, in a way, it's more about circumstances in which you get to read than, say, "I read those for pleasure."

PD: It's less the aim and more the circumstances. Well, aside from the ham-mock and the Caribbean, which sound, on this gray October day in Edmon-ton, very, very attractive, what are the other circumstances of reading, for you? Obviously, you're behind a desk a lot of time, too.

PR: Yes, well, and right now I have a 5-year-old boy so it's very hard for me to find any solitude. I go to coffee shops. I go to coffee shops in the far end of town where I can't be spotted by students, anybody, just to have ...

PD: Some quiet time.

PR: Starbucks is probably my favourite; it's open till 11 o'clock at night. After my boy's in bed, I go out and I hide there.

PD: Some Second Cups are actually open until one in the morning. (mutual laughter)

PR: But, but it's true. Coffee shops ... I like reading in public places.

PD: You don't find that distracting at all? And can it be just as engrossing to you to be reading publicly as reading more or less privately in your hammock?

PR: Yeah, I think in some ways even more so. But that's just a symptom of, you know, having got through five years of motherhood. (mutual laughter) A public space is more of a private space than a private space is. I actually find it comforting that there's all sorts of stuff around. I create my quiet space.

PD: What has motherhood taught you about reading, about your child's reading?

PR: My boy just loves being read to, and has from the day he came home from the hospital. What has it taught me about reading? It's taught me that with children you don't need to read things to them that they already understand. It stretches their minds to have stuff read to them, that they can listen to things they can't necessarily understand.

PD: Or that they couldn't read on their own.

PR: Yeah, and still be learning.

PD: So what are some of the things you read to your son?

PR: Well, I was in England in the summer, and I brought him back cartoon versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Greek myths, and they're the most wonderful, you know, wonderfully illustrated strips, very well written. and he's just obsessed with these. So we read them over and over again, and, of course, this is my way of refreshing my (mutual laughter) my memory! I'm just so thrilled that it seems that we've reached a point where we can, you know, read the tales of King Arthur. We read things now that I want to remember ... and review and so on. Bu these are things that he loves, you know, all of the little things, all of the things that five-year-old boys love, like swords and battles and blood and all that kind of stuff.

PD: I remember reading Jane Eyre in a comic version when I was very, very young, but, by the time I got to university, I edited out, deleted that portion of my memory.

PR: (gasp)

PD: I never admitted it to anyone because somehow this was déclassé to say that you had first read it in a comic version. Do you think that that attitude still prevails today?

PR: I don't think so. I think that probably because of the study of popular culture, cartoons are actually cool, to have knowledge of, you know, the classic comics would be considered important.

PD: Would you read Shakespeare in a comic version to your son?

PR: No. No.

PD: Why would you draw the line?

PR: Because I wouldn't want that language ...

PD: ... to be mangled ?

PR: ... to be what was in his mind. If it's just about the plot, you know, probably, "proper" students of the classics would never read the Iliad and the Odyssey.

PD: But they're not always proper students when they're five years old.

PR: Well, that's true, but, it's interesting. I have a colleague who's a Shakespearean, and who has a daughter Carl's age, and I thought of that very question. Was I going to give her, you know, a kid's version of Shakespeare? And I thought, "No, she'll want video, too."

PD: Well, Charles and Mary Lamb retold tales from Shakespeare. Is that a kind of bastardizing of the original? Would you draw the line there?

PR: Maybe I just think of that as a classic in itself.

PD: It is!

PR: But maybe not the cheap summaries of Shakespeare that you pick off the sale table at Chapters.

PD: It's not Coles Notes!

PR: But that probably has to do with my relationship to Shakespeare. I can never remember the plots, but I love the soliloquies.

PD: (laughter) We love the sound of the language, too.

PR: Exactly. Exactly.

PD: But that's what your son is responding to right now, the sound of the language, and your voice, and, that's probably one of the reasons, in addition to the language and the action, that he's so - as you say - obsessed with these texts. What about your own reading as a child? What did you read?

PR: Oh, that much I've have time to think about. Well, it's not very impressive, I must say.

PD: Listen, I've admitted to Jane Eyre in the comic version so ... ! But, of course, I was very young! I think I was about six!

PR: Well, that's actually, very impressive. The first book I remember loving - loving, loving - was called The Little Ballerina, and it was a big, square book ... .

PD: Picture book?

PR: Yes. I can still see the pictures of those little ballerinas and remember being obsessed with their tutus and shoes and all of that stuff. I think that's the first one ...

PD: And you wanted to be a ballerina?

PR: I wanted to be a ballerina! And then there was The Wizard of Oz. I still have my beloved copy, to which I knew all the words, and my mom, of course, would try to skip a page when she was in a hurry, but she could never get away with it.

PD: What was the appeal of The Wizard of Oz? Can you speculate about that?

PR: Maybe this is a connection with my son, but, un-like everybody I knew, I was really fascinated by those flying monkeys; they created such a sense of menace. I mean, I wasn't terrified by it, but I was fascinated by the feeling of menace, I guess, and the bonds that protected, and, of course, Dorothy's shoes. They're just silver and red in the movie.

PD: We notice those material details, don't we?

PR: That's right, that's right. And the cowardly lion, well, because now, we're going into the movies. You know, shifting over.

PD: Did you find yourself as a child, when you saw the movie, noting these differences and being pleased with them, or just, kind of, drinking it all in?

PR: Just drinking it.

PD: Yes, you didn't care; this was a cinematic version of something you loved.

PR: That's right. That's right.

PD: And, another book?

PR: I was just going to say, and then The Bobbsey Twins.

PD: Oh! Me, too!

PR: Is that right?

PD: Oh, yes! By the Seashore and all the other ones.

PR: Absolutely. My best friend, whom I'm visiting during my stay here, lived across the street; together we read all The Bobbsey Twins, and we just shared them. So it was that shared experience, and that sense of serial reading ... .

PD: Right. There was also the sense of the secure family, wasn't there and, there were bonds as well. There were some adventures, but the adventures were always, in a sense, rather tame, weren't they?

PR: Yes, they were. Exactly. It was security, but it was continuity.

PD: Childhood's pastoral, we might say?

PR: Yeah, yeah. But I also remember The Edmonton Journal used to have serial stories for children. It must have been once a week on Saturdays or something like that ...

PD: And what did they serialize?

PR: You know, I don't remember what they were now.

PD: In my childhood, in another Canadian city, I know that they serialized Uncle Wiggily.

PR: Oh, did they?

PD: Yes! I remember my father reading Uncle Wiggily until, of course, he would nod off, and I would creep downstairs to announce, "Daddy's asleep."(mutual laughter)

PR: I read Uncle Wiggily to my boy.

PD: I loved Uncle Wiggily, and Nurse Jane Fuzzy-Wuzzy. (mutual laughter)

PR: Yes, all that stuff. I remember one around Hallowe'en in Edmonton. There was a sort of spooky story, but it was serialized for a month or something like that; I loved that idea that there was going to be more story the next day.

PD: And it was just for you - just for children.

PR: It wasn't just this little thing that was going to end but that something was left open, and I had more to look forward to.

PD: Do you think that's part of your son's enjoyment today, that therecould be many comics, but that you're not going to finish the whole comic in one evening?

PR: That's right.

PD: That there'll be more.

PR: But he has a very large library.

PD: I'll bet he has!

PR: Wherever we go, we're just always buying books, but he also gets to go and choose what he wants.

PD: So there's no monitoring of his choices.

Gwen Stacey and Peter Parker, in Spiderman.© Marvel Comics Group. Stan Lee and John Romita.

PR: No, because we want him just to love, to love the whole thing. So we're very eclectic. It's Spiderman one minute, and ...

PD: And the Greek classics the next.

PR: That's right. We just want him to love it.

PD: And he obviously does.

PR: He does.

PD: Were there any restrictions on your reading as a child, or was it wide open as well?

PR: It was wide open as well. My father was a great reader - he read history and sports and so on. He took my best friend and me to the library.

PD: That was an expedition for us as children, wasn't it? I mean, it was almost a weekly ritual.

PR: Yes, to go to the library. And they had a ... they had a reading ...

PD: Club?

PR: Yes a Club, a club thing where you'd have the little flag, and if you brought your books back, your little flag moved further along the track.

PD: And you had your own card. It was terribly important to hold onto that card. I never lost mine!

PR: Is that right? You still have it probably?

PD: Well, I don't know that I still have it, but I remember, as a child, I never lost it. It was the passport to that weekly expedition. It was wonderful to walk into the library and to realize that there were sections - at least, when I was a child - there were sections for children and then young adults, and when you graduated to Y.A., well, that was a real ascension to glory.

PR: That's right. And I remember the smell of the books and those plastic-y covers.

PD: Yes. It was combination of the smell of the books and of the sound of the creaking oiled hardware floors as I was walking over to the shelves and to the librarian's desk. I just loved every aspect of it.

PR: That's right. And then, I was sitting in the living room with my father; he would be reading in his chair, and I would be reading in the big square green chair with a stack of bunny crackers (mutual laughter)

PD: Feeling very important!

PD: And did your father read to you as much as your mother?

PR: You know, I don't remember them reading to me so much as telling me stories. My mother used to tell us or make up stories like "Kids on the Farm". They were the "Dicky" stories - Dicky Saunders. Dicky was always getting in trouble. My brother and I just loved these stories because Dicky was always in much more trouble than we would ever get into. So it was, "Tell us a Dicky story."

PD: You felt quite virtuous by contrast to Dicky, is that it?

PR: Yes. Yes.

PD: Well, let's return to the range of your reading today. I'm not drawing a distinction between professional and pleasurable reading, but, in what new fields has your reading taken you?

PR: Well, I think probably my favourite thing to read now is biographies. I used to read ten new Canadian novels in a month, just absorb myself in these personalities and so on, but, perhaps it's something about getting older and the plots all becoming too familiar or predictable. I also think that we do excessively hype some of our writers, you know. There's a sort of sense of disappointment when you actually read the text, that there's a lot of pretentious, overwritten stuff.

PD: What are the differences when you read a biography?

PR: Well, first of all, I always feel that I will have learned something. I love reading biographies of women and men in the 30s because I'm so obsessed with the 30s, obviously.

PD: What are some of the recent biographies you've enjoyed?

PR: Well, I read the biography of Robert Capa, the photographer, the documentary photographer, who took the most famous photographs of the Spanish Civil War. That was just fascinating because he was a man who lived a life without any obligations to anyone, but himself, but he found himself at all of the most extraordinary historical mo-ments. I mean, he just seemed, by chance, to end up at D-day, and he took some of the most famous photographs at D-day, too. There was a certain amount of serendipity. He just was sort of in the right place at the right time. I guess I'm fascinated with male lives because, I suppose, of the greater degree of freedom that men have enjoyed. He's in battle one minute, and he's drinking wine with Hemingway in Paris the next minute. And it's just that ... .

PD: They seem to be able to move with impunity ...

PR: Yes. Yes!

PD: from one, momentous situation to another.

PR: And I'm just thinking, "He doesn't have to be at the ramp at school at quarter to five." And the conversations he had! I guess I love good conversation, and I love imagining situations where you wouldn't have to stop the conversation if it was good. Nobody had to look at their watch. I'm interested in, you know, fascinated, sort of, by male figures who were living the history of the times but who also managed to find themselves in those cafés with bottles of wine and never had to be home at any appointed hour. That freedom, that fantasy of freedom. Another wonderful book that I read not long ago is Russell Martin's Picasso's War, which is the story of the Guernica painting, and Picasso's whole process of drafting and redrafting the sketches, painting the work, and then the fate of the painting, the life of the painting, the political controversies around it, where it moved to, right up to recently, when it was repatriated back to Spain. While Franco was in power, Picasso never wanted the painting returned to Spain. I loved reading it.

PD: How long did he actually work on drafting it as a painting?

PR: Well, I'm not sure how long. It may have been just a year, but he was drafting this painting before Guernica happened because he was drafting it as a picture of an artist's studio. So there's the transforma- tion of this incredibly interior expression of private experience into the greatest political painting.

PD: It reminds me of what Vermeer did with The Artist's The Artist's Studio in presenting Clio as the muse of history. But behind Clio, there is a map of the Netherlands, a map that displays, through its incongruities, the effects of the wars in the Netherlands. And so everything is brought together in what appears to be a kind of aesthetic representation of late-seventeenth century artist's studio when, in fact, it's actually a commentary.

PR: Yes, and I think we can pick out a lot of incongruities in Guernica, too. You know, on the topic of war writing, my favourite autobiography is Vera Brittain's trilogy. What fascinates me the most about the trilogy is that the last volume, Testament of Experience, talks about the writing of the first volume and, most centrally, about the man she lost in the war. She talks in the last volume about how her husband allowed her to go through the process of writing, and then exorcising grief over her first great love.

PD: She has to expel, almost, the demon of her grief.

PR: Yes, yes, and so it becomes a comment on the process of mourning. The first time I read that book, ten years or so ago, I wasn't thinking about any of the issues I'm thinking about now, but one of the things - and I'm sure you feel this about your own lifetime reading - is that it's an organic development. You just don't know why you're attracted to certain things.

PD: Precisely.

PR: There are deep connections.

PD: And at the time of the attraction, you can't explain it. I mean, you're quite inarticulate to someone else to explain why you're doing this when you're asked why you're so obsessive about this really strange or obscure or impossible topic.

PR: That's right. I'll tell you about another kind of book that I enjoy. I would love to have more, you know, tips about books with this kind of plot, but it's the narrative where the crime is committed by the protago-nist at the beginning, or it has already been committed, and the whole book is about living and covering up, covering up one's guilt. Donna Tartt's Secret History is about a group of college students in New England - Classics students - who murder one of their classmates, and it's a 500-page novel. It's about this group of people who all have that secret. There's a pair of them - boyfriend and girlfriend - Charles and Diana - no, Charles and Camilla. (mutual laughter)

PD: How effective!

PR: That idea of living with guilt.

PD: Do they actually articulate their guilt?

PR: Oh, yeah, they know. They're just living, they're trying to live so that nobody else can figure it out, and there's that sense of the world slowly figuring out, a kind of knowledge, the awareness, of the kill closing, closing in on them.

PD: So they are acknowledging their guilt.

PR: Oh yes. It's just about trying to get on, like if you've made the fatal mistake already, and you just want to get on with your life. If the mistake is discovered, your life is effectively over.

PD: So the whole narrative line is consequentialist?

PR: Yes. And to me, that's so much more interesting. I don't like reading mysteries because I think, well, at the end, you find out ...

PD: Whodunit.

PR: ... and who cares. It's like a crossword puzzle to me. The solution is already there, and it's just a question of your discovering it.

PD: So you're passing way beyond Amanda Cross and "mysteries" like that.

PR: Yes. I mean, I just don't see the point. I think the best books are the ones that don't resolve anything.

PD: I was thinking of what Atwood does in The Blind Assassin. She actually retraces or reinvents the circumstances of a death, and we never actually find out or decipher the clear circumstances of the death, the death of the narrator's younger sister, until the very end of the book. There is this retrieved manuscript that achieves a great deal of posthumous fame,ostensibly written by the dead girl, which has, in fact, been written by the narrator herself. And so there are mysteries nested inside mysteries,...

PR: Yeah. Yes, yes.

PD: ... and it's a mystery about writing, about emotion, about disclosure. But it's not quite the pattern that interests or has interested you. I was wondering if, in your reading in the 1930s and 40s, but 30s in par-ticular, you ever came across any of the work of P.L. Travers. She's a writer for children, and she was doing most of the Mary Poppins books during this period.

PR: I remember Mary Poppins.

PD: She wrote two pieces that might be of interest, directly reflecting wartime experience: first the experience of evacuation in diary form, called I Go By Land, I Go By Sea, written ostensibly an 11-year old girl, Sabrina, who was evacuated from England to the U.S., and then, after the war, she celebrated the first carol service in St. Paul's Cathedral with a fable called The Fox in the Manger. It's really a fable about reconciliation. That's why I asked the question at your talk yesterday about any traces of the psalms and prophecy and the prayerful in elegaic poetry, ...

PR: That's wonderful.

PD: ... in this discourse of consolation, because there does seem to be a yearning for reconciliation. There's a good deal of cynicism, I admit, but I was wondering if you had discovered links between conventional religious or biblical discourse, in the psalms and the prophets, which are not without their grim images, ...

PR: Of course.

PD: ... and the discourses of consolation that you're looking at.

PR: Not so far. But it's worth thinking about.

PD: Tell me about your fascination with Hemingway.

PR: Well, when I was in high school, and I still wasn't reading anything good, you know, I was reading those young adult books from the libraries ...

PD: The YA's!

PR: The YA's, most of which were about high school life, and boys with square shoulders and basketball players with square heads, the romances and stuff, I mean, just absolute trash, but ... .

PD: As in Sue Barton, Student Nurse.

PR Exactly!

PD: I went through the whole Sue Barton series, I'm afraid!

PR: You know, I was so thrilled when I was in graduate school that there's a woman named Patricia Rae, who writes nurse novels. My friends gave me several copies. One is called - picture it - Trauma Nurse.

PD: You should put that up on your door!

PR: Exactly! All of my pulp novels, and they're just dreadful, but I'm so proud - the only other Patricia Rae!

PD: But, Hemingway.

PR: I can't even remember why I read A Moveable Feast; I don't remember who gave it to me.

PD: That was the first Hemingway you read?

PR: Yes, and it just changed my life because it's that idea of freedom, masculine freedom, or a fantasy about that. I was in suburban Ottawa, you know. And it was also the sense of deprivation because he was liv-ing in Paris, he had no money, but a plate of peas in gravy was heaven to him, and he talks in that book about how hunger enables you to appreciate paintings. He'd go to the Louvre and look at the paintings, and he was starving, but he would stand in front of Cézanne's Apples. That just sent me because it was about this intensity of experience with that solitude and freedom ...

PD: And the aesthetic experience.

PR: ... and the aesthetic experience.

PD: Also about the appeal of the Bohemian lifestyle.

PR: Exactly.

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