Ron Irwin. Flat water
Tuesday. Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2013. ISBN 9781250035981.
Flat Water Tuesday is
available in South Africa at all bookstores and releases worldwide on June 4.
Joan Hambidge, a buddy and colleague of author Ron Irwin, asked him a few
questions over a glass of whisky.
Congratulations on
your wonderful debut, Flat water
Tuesday, a riveting novel. The sport
is not just about brute power. Or endurance. Or the ability to suffer. Rowing
in a team forces you to respond to what other men do in the boat. To adhere to
a strategy. To follow commands. To put your petty gripes and prejudices and
fears aside” (65). Rowing is a metaphor for endurance. Are you personally
interested in this sport?
I learned how to row at the West Side Rowing Club in
Buffalo, New York when I was 15 and went on to boarding school in Connecticut,
where I rowed for three years. I also rowed at university in two varsity teams.
I have rowed as a sculler, in a four-man shell and in an eight-man shell. It is
safe to say that there was a considerable time in my life when all that
mattered was rowing. I was lucky enough to have had magnificent coaching and to
have rowed with some truly talented oarsmen. It really wasn't until my last
year in university when it occurred to me that there might be more to life than
rowing, and I quit the sport so I could have free time to have fun, party … do
normal college student things. But I also knew that I was not going to get much
better as a rower. I had reached my personal best during the final races of my
third year at university. Overall, I was a good rower, but not as good as the
main character in my novel. I had friends at boarding school who were truly
gifted athletes, and my knowledge of what they experienced informed the novel.
My brother was the captain of his university team, and he was probably a
stronger oar than I was. He was lucky enough to row in the English Henley in an
eight named after my father, who supported our efforts wholeheartedly.
Rowing is a metaphor for endurance and commitment to a team.
There is no sport I know of that asks so much of its participants. Rowers train
year round. My university team forbade drinking during the racing season.
Rowers pride themselves on going out on the water in truly atrocious weather.
There were numerous times when I would come off the water with icicles hanging
off my oar. It is a sport that rewards obsession. You don't need to be very
coordinated to row and it doesn't take a long time to really excel at the sport
if you start out in good shape – unlike, say, golf or tennis, which require
years of work before you have any proficiency. But there is nothing like the
feeling of a truly fast boat. I still have dreams about it. It feels like
flying.
The book reflects on
death and the impact of a suicide on friends (buddies) at an American school
(Fenton). “Blue blood” and Ivy League references analyse class differences in
America. Comment.
The important thing to remember about boarding school is
that it is an intense experience where coming from wealth really doesn't
matter, because everyone is wealthy. Kids at that age are far more concerned
about sporting prowess and a certain kind of savoir-faire than class. But if
you come into that environment from sheer poverty, like my main character does,
it is intimidating. On the other hand, if you are good at rowing, you
immediately join the most elite club in an already elite environment. A good
oarsman is treated like a god at a top rowing school. There is nothing like it.
Some other sports have a certain status in American boarding schools – like
football or hockey – but most of my rowing friends looked down on those. The
importance of rowing, which is an Olympic sport, can simply not be
overestimated. The major race of the year is held in England (Henley), and the
expense of sending a team overseas to row an $80 000 boat down a race course
once or twice is astronomical. There is a reason why the top Ivy League Schools
– Harvard, Yale, Princeton – recruit top teams. Harvard has a waiting list of
alumni who want to donate boats. The other schools probably have the same
thing. It is an intensely clubby experience. In fact, the top rowing team at
the boarding school in the novel (and at my real-life boarding school) is
actually called the "club", not the "varsity". There was no
other sports team on campus that had its own club. And all you needed to do to
get in was to be willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. Family
connections meant nothing. How much money you had, what you wore, how nice you
were, who your friends were, these were are all irrelevant. I remember feeling
really sorry for the son of some famous millionaire banker because we could all
beat him on the ergometer (rowing machine). I think the kid owned a Porsche,
but to my mind he was a truly sorry figure.
I always say that the sport is "tribal". And that
tribal experience is what informs the parts in the novel about rowing.
Rob Carrey, the main
storyteller, a filmmaker for National
Geographic, travels to different
countries. The backdrop of Africa (for instance Zambia) has an enormous impact
on his experience of New York. The novel could be read as the insider returning
as the outsider. You are an American living in South Africa and frequently
returning to the States. Did your current position as an ex-American – albeit
full-blooded Yank – influence this device?
Certainly. I have been lucky enough to do a great deal of
travelling, and of course I have lived in South Africa for over 20 years. But I
still think of the USA – and more specifically, Buffalo, New York – as home and
travel back often. Over the years I have come to realise just how different my
experience was, rowing in high school and at university. Especially since I
teach at a university! The sport was intense, but why was I so obsessed with
it? I think that if I were to be 18 again, I probably would have a lot more fun
in college than I did back then. When I went to university my first order of
business was to try out for the rowing team. I enjoyed my classes, but rowing
was really just as important. Possibly more important. I had two or three
girlfriends dump me because they got tired of the fact that I was getting up at
the crack of dawn every day to row and couldn't go to the various parties with
them because I needed to be in bed sleeping. And my weekends were given over to
racing or training. And all my friends were rowers. It was crazy. What was I
thinking? I really should have partied more. Seriously.
But I also should say that I write from personal experience.
In my fiction I am trying to grapple with problems that remain unresolved.
Rowing was a pursuit that was very important to me, but of course I never was
quite as good as I wanted to be, and I discovered as I got older that many of
my friends who were excellent rowers had a very hard time adjusting to adult
life outside of the boat. In fact, one of my rowing friends from university
days did jump off a bridge. I got the call from a former teammate while I was
at home in Buffalo after having been in South Africa for two or three years. It
was quite a shock. He was a super-successful guy, a great oar … one of those
people that seems to have it all. So I put that into the novel. Every year I go
back to the United States I am more and more a tourist. In one sense, I am also
a tourist to my own history. But aren't we all?
The impact of youth
traumas – for instance the death of the main character’s sister and the
family’s response to the tragedy – is carefully analysed. The book is a
reflection on youth. Did Rob Carrey have to return to his youth (as Alice
Miller would suggest) to understand his current position and difficult
relationship with his partner?
I think that what happens to you in your teen youth stays
with you. Rowing is a wonderful pursuit, but it does create a person who can be
extremely callous to the suffering of other people. It also creates somebody
who is rather intense. My university coach used to say that he never knew a top
rower who wasn't a prick. It's a sad thing to say, but it takes a certain kind
of arrogance to be a really good oarsmen. You need to really believe that you
are better not only than everybody else in the boat, but also than another boat
full of guys who were just as big and committed. You need to be under the
impression that you deserve to win all the time. You need to look down on
people who give in to weakness. You need to be extremely harsh on yourself as
well. You need to force yourself to get up every single morning to train and
force yourself to get better all the time. Most of the guys I knew who were
really good did this partly because they couldn't stand the thought of somebody
else beating them. It wasn't about the beauty of the sport, or teamwork. It was
about being the best in making it look easy.
The main character has grown up, however. And while much of
the novel is about rowing, its heart is about the love between Rob and Carolyn.
Rob knows that he is losing her and he desperately wants to hold on to her.
From the main character's perspective as an adult, rowing has lost its meaning.
The most important thing in the world is holding on to this very special woman.
And yet, due to his own thoughtlessness, their relationship has become
fractured. Part of it is that he simply needs to say he's sorry. But that's
difficult for many men. Rob is one of them. Part of understanding what happens
in the novel between these two adults is understanding what happens to Rob and
his past. You need to learn as you get older that being tough also means
knowing when you are wrong in learning how to sympathise with somebody else's
feelings, even when she's being impossible. But of course this is the story of
men and women since the beginning of time. More than that, when you become an
adult you realise there are things in life that are far worse than losing a
race. Like saying goodbye to the love of your life.
Flat Water Tuesday © Chrizane van Zyl
The impact of alcohol
and the effect on Rob’s judgment is also a leitmotif in the novel. The fight in
the hotel in Zambia and Rob’s view of himself as a “wicked loser” (184), for
instance.
You are right – the main character is quite a drinker. So is
his girlfriend, Carolyn. I think I wanted to explore the fact that drinking
creates an alternative reality that you might say parallels the alternative
reality of sports. Drinking in Flat Water
Tuesday is often a means of either numbing the pain or breaking down
barriers. There is no question that Rob is somebody who struggles to express
his feelings, and who struggles with tragedy. Drinking is a means of escaping
from his feelings and indeed his worries. But people who drink to escape often
find themselves in situations that are far worse than they started out with.
Rob's situation in Zambia is a case in point. Upon getting bad news from
Carolyn, he immediately goes to the bar and gets extremely drunk and then
beaten up by the security guards in his hotel. I think many men have had
similar episodes, where they begin drinking knowing that they are going to get
absolutely blotto because sobriety is so shitty at the moment. When Rob goes
back to Carolyn, one of his major mistakes is allowing himself to wallow in his
pain, and to drink alone. It means that he makes a crucial error while he is
taking care of her, and this has disastrous ramifications. But could it also be
that we sometimes drink to manage love? I think for many people the incredible
power of the feeling of being in love needs to be dulled. I think there is a
reason why wine and love go together. For some people the feeling is so
extreme, so intense, that alcohol is the best way to handle it. Drinking makes
it all far more humorous. And it reminds us that we are, after all, animals driven
by biology and chemicals and not always by the endless, tiring demands of our
emotions. Does it sound bad to say that I've never loved a woman who didn't
appreciate a good bottle of wine?
You are a former
student of JM Coetzee, who praises the book on the dust cover. Any comments on
the impact of creative writing courses and mentoring another writer? I think
you wrote Flat Water Tuesday over a period of ten years ...?
Studying under JM Coetzee was, of course, a major privilege,
and I think that he provided what is certainly the best thing a mentor can
provide: a good example. He was (and probably still is) immensely hardworking
and self-effacing. He took great pains with his writing and forced me to do the
same; and more than that, he made it clear to me that being a writer was a very
serious business. This was important for me to learn, because I think when I
was younger I thought of being a writer as a kind of an outgrowth of travelling
the world and basically having lots of fun. JM Coetzee showed me that it was
just as difficult to be a good writer as it is to be a good lawyer or a good
doctor and it takes just about the same amount of commitment to the career. He
also was an immensely professional person: he never missed the meeting and
ensured that my academic and creative work were up to par. When I began working
in the University of Cape Town Creative Writing Department I tried to bring
that same kind of seriousness to my own work. But of course, I don't have the
kind of gravitas that JM Coetzee has. Instead, I try to approach student work
like an editor would. I look for certain mistakes that seem to come from
students again and again. I have overseen over a dozen MA degrees in creative
writing and also helped over two dozen people find publication. In so doing I
have picked up many errors that irritate acquisition editors and publishing
houses. I also find that I am not as disciplined as I think I should be, and
really hate editing, even though I force myself to do it.
The story of Flat
Water Tuesday's creation is fairly interesting. I started the novel back in
1992 and found an American agent to represent it a couple of years later. But
the original version was only about boarding school. It did not have the adult
love story which is so crucial to what it is now. The writing was also pretty
crude. It was rejected by every single publisher who saw it, and when I rewrote
it in 1995 the revised version got the same treatment. I think I kept making
the same kind of editorial errors, and I needed to learn more about the art of
fiction before I returned to the novel. Teaching was certainly a wonderful
means of learning how to edit myself. I was also ridiculously stubborn. It
never occurred to me to write a novel about another subject. That would have seemed
like giving up. And then two years ago my friend at the University of Cape
Town, Stephen Watson, died quite unexpectedly and quite tragically. Near the
end, he told a close friend of his that he was glad he had “left a paper
trail”, meaning that he was very glad he had left so much good poetry behind
and a collection of wonderful essays. It was at that point I realised that I
owed myself one more crack at Flat Water
Tuesday. I wanted a paper trail. So I literally became my own student. I
opened up my old manuscript and read it as if it were a student’s work and
discovered that most of it had to be deleted. I sat down over a few weeks and
simply pared down the novel to a few chapters and then started from scratch. I
didn't tell anyone I was doing this; I simply went to work. I knew, however,
that I wanted the love story to be the central element of the novel. And I
wanted to weave that story into the rowing narrative. This is what made the
book completely different from what it had been. Rowing became a metaphor for
the loss that these two characters, Rob and Carolyn, were facing together. When
I finally did finish the novel I knew I had told the story that I had always
wanted to tell. When I sent the manuscript to my editor in New York, Kathleen
Gilligan at St Martin's Press, it was immediately accepted. I have told dozens
of students to believe in their work and not take no for an answer, I think I
had to tell myself that as well.
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