A Letter From Timothy Findley
© Paula E. Kirman
Theatre is central to Findley's life and work, which is why he and his partner, Bill Whitehead (Tiff and Bill to their friends) divide their time between Stratford, Ontario and the south of France. It is also the central backdrop to his latest novel, Spadework (HarperFlamingo; hardcover; $35.00).
Spadework is a novel with many converging storylines, all stemming from the careless act of a gardener who cuts through a telephone line. Set in Stratford admidst the bustle of the theatre community, Griffen and Jane Kincaid are the couple around which the rest of the novel unfolds. Griffen is a gorgeous young actor whose ambition almost ruins his marriage and relationship with his son. Jane is convinced Griffen is cheating on her, and life gets further complicated when the irresistibly handsome Bell repairman shows up to fix the damaged line.
I interviewed Timothy Findley by letter, since his tight schedule did not permit a face-to-face meeting when he was in my neck of the woods. His responses were eloquent and insightful, despite his almost apologizing for his "shortish" answers, written while he was finishing yet another play set for a staging in January at the Stratford Festival.
"Shortish" turned out to be two full pages, single-spaced, of typed responses. Here is the first part of our interview.
Paula: One of the aspects I enjoyed most about Spadework, were all of the converging storylines. Did the novel come together in a linear fashion, or were all of the stories originally separate from each other?
Timothy Findley: The novel Spadework was born in the summer of 1998, a day before I was supposed to deliver to my publishers a page about the next novel - and I didn't have a single idea. Bill Whitehead and I were then renting a house on Cambria Street in Stratford, waiting for our condominium to be completed. What happened that summer day was basically what happened to Jane - a gardener cutting the telephone line, and the arrival of the most beautiful human being I have ever seen - made more so by the fact that he (the Bell repairman) had no awareness of his beauty. I then started writing the book, and, having developed the main characters and story lines, was well into the book before it occurred to me that there could be other effects of the cut line - the inability to make a call (Griff and Jonathan) and the equal inability to receive a call (Luke and Runner). Thus, the story lines did develop in a relatively linear fashion.
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