Locked in the Ice and Free to Play

Steven Heighton, one of Canada's finest writers, talks to HH about fashioning fiction from fact in his new novel, Afterlands, which we are very proud to be publishing next month.

Duke Ellington once said that it's good to have limits. He was talking about jazz music, of course, but I think the same can be said about literature. These days when I write poetry I often use some sort of constraining form – sometimes a traditional form, like the sonnet, sometimes one of my own devising – to help compress and intensify the material and also the medium, language. That's what the limitations of form are for. Not to provide a stage on which a writer gets to preen and flaunt mastery of the craft; not to promote retrograde cultural nostalgia or politically reactionary attitudes. Simply, formal constraints impose a framework that forces the imagination to dig deeper, while making the writer compress and intensify the raw material of the poem – or, sometimes, the novel.

The framework of historical fact that I used in writing my novel Afterlands worked pretty much in this way. Actually the material I settled on was particularly suited to imposing constraints, and not only formally but geographically. Here's a synopsis of the incident I worked from: In 1871 the US Navy sent a largely civilian expedition north to the Arctic where it was to reach the North Pole, if possible, and plant the American flag. But the ship, the USS Polaris, was stopped by the ice, and after a full winter trapped in the ice it was forced to turn back. It didn't get far. During a storm in which the ship seemed to be sinking, much of the crew – a white American, a black American, five Germans, a Dane, a Swede, an Englishman, and two Inuit families – were cast away on a large ice-floe, which then began to shrink steadily as it drifted south in the Arctic seas, through the darkness of an Arctic winter. This microcosm of varied characters soon began fragmenting along ethnic and national lines, even as the floe's steady shrinking forced them into ever closer quarters.

From a novelist's point of view, this ordeal offered many attractions, including all the traditional excitements of a survival tale. Thematically, I saw, it could make a forceful, post-9/11 parable of ethnic nationalism, pack behaviour, and other kinds of extremism. But it was equally attractive in terms of form and structure. For if the floe was a microcosm, it was also a stage. I would have no choice about where to set my scenes. In fact, as the floe got progressively smaller, I would have less and less choice – a lack of choice that would, paradoxically, free me, allowing me to focus wholly on the scenes themselves and my captive cast of characters. And this is a vital truth about formal limits: by constraining you, they also free you.

With Afterlands I was freed from anxieties about the overall shape and structure of the book not only in terms of place but also in terms of time, of incident, since what happened on the ice was loosely documented. The ranking officer on the floe, an American, George Tyson, took rough notes during the ordeal and, after he and some of the other castaways were saved, hastily expanded and embroidered them into a book called Arctic Experiences. When I got hold of a first edition of the book I was as intrigued by the seeming gaps in Tyson's account as by the account itself. The silence, the virtual absence of many of Tyson's fellow castaways I found suggestive and eloquent. Tyson generally depicts himself as the One Reasonable Man while the others neurotically plot to steal, desert, mutiny, murder, malinger, and cannibalize; I couldn't help suspecting that the castaways, in their hunger and fear and desperation, must all have behaved badly at certain times – and, at other times, acted nobly, heroically.

I decided to excerpt key passages from Tyson's memoir and use them in Afterlands as narrative vertebrae, then flesh them out with invented scenes from the points of view of two other important figures: Roland Kruger, a rebellious, free-thinking German sailor, and Tukulito, an Inuit woman who was the Arctic's first professional interpreter. At times my improvised scenes replay Tyson's own recountings, though from other points of view, allowing me to carry out a sort of dramatic triangulation on events and characters. At other times these scenes simply imagine what might have occurred in the narrative rifts, those tantalizing gaps in Tyson's book. In other words I worked with what was recorded, while giving myself the freedom to fill in the silences – to riff and improvise in a way that a jazz musician would understand. For this purpose I was lucky to find a story that was chronicled enough to provide a framework, but not so much as to constrain invention.

But there is another part to the novel – a shorter but still substantial final section, the 'afterlands' part of the book, that follows my three protagonists through the rest of their lives. And for this material there is little documentation, sometimes none at all. In the case of Kruger's afterstory I've resorted to pure conjecture. Essentially what I did was to use the factual foundation of the ice story as a launching-quay for a sustained, exploratory last riff. Call it an adventure in pure improv – an elating shift from constraint and containment into unbounded freedom – but a freedom still defined and ordered by the demands on structure and length established in the first two-thirds of the book. So even in this final journey into creative freedom, with Kruger in Mexico, I was guided by the sort of helpful limits that the Duke relished when playing or composing jazz.

Afterlands, by Steven Heighton, is published in hardback this month.

This piece originally appeared on the wonderful Beatrice.com