This Week in Fiction: Annie Proulx

Your story in this week’s issue, “Rough Deeds,” is set among the men who tried to capitalize on New England’s forests in the first half of the eighteenth century. What drew you to the subject?

One of my earliest infant memories is of light filtering down through tree leaves, as my mother often put me under a tree to nap. During my childhood, our family took vacations in “the woods,” the ragtag-bobtail remains of the great northeastern blanket of forest. We usually camped out in Maine. Years later, I went fishing with a friend through the Allegash country, and here and there, in very steep or awkward-to-cut places, were tiny pockets of old forest that had eluded the axe. As I aged, I learned that there was much more to a forest than trees, and I began to glimpse the extraordinary symbiotic connections between soil, land shape, weather, senescence, decay, propagation, seeds and roots, insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals, including humans.

I have experienced fleeting thoughts about the disappearance of forests most of my adult life. About fifteen years ago, back in my driving days, when I crossed the continent by different routes, I passed through a scrap of a town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was a scrubby place with a single building, a derelict all-purpose store, and on a hillside of bushes and weeds I saw a sign saying something to the effect that on this spot the century before grew the greatest white-pine forest in the world. Nothing was left of that forest except the sign, and that was when I began to think about writing a novel intertwined with the history of deforestation. The story “Rough Deeds,” from an early part of the work, follows one thread in the novel.

The novel turns around the fortunes and descendants of two young men from France, who come to New France in the late seventeenth century. One of the men, René, a woodcutter, is forced by his seigneur to marry a Mi’kmaq Indian woman, and his descendants are allied with that tribe as it suffers the onslaughts of the white takeover. The other, Duquet, featured in this short excerpt, does everything he can, no holds barred, to achieve a fortune.

Was industry in those forests as wild and dangerous as it is in your depiction?

Log-poaching and thievery, murder, deceit, injury, false documents, land-grabbing, shady deals and legal practices, bribery, corruption of government lawmakers, and more were part of the logging industry, early and late. On the other hand, there were people who sensed that something irreplaceable was disappearing. Yet there was always more forest—somewhere.

Duquet, who has come from France to New France—or Quebec—is in partnership with Dred-Peacock, an English colonist in Boston. Together, they sell timber to the Old World, to be used in the construction of warships—which could potentially be used against them. Is there ambivalence in their adoption of the New World, or is it just all about the money?

It was very much about the money, though I do think that British mast-tree laws fed more energy into the American Revolution than tea did. Those seemingly inexhaustible forests, the most important source of wealth in the colonial period, were the great resource, a help-yourself raw material. But, of course, there was more to it; religion and the Bible, a sense of entitlement, tunnel vision, a conquistador ethos on the part of the newcomers, the European wars, population numbers, technology, and much more—all this butted up against the beliefs and behavior of people who had lived with the forest, in a way that only a few Indian tribes in South America still practice. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the individualistic and forceful behavior of the European newcomers was like a grindstone against the holistic forest-world views of the native peoples.

_You seem to take great pleasure in the description of these ancient forests:

On steep slopes it was the ancient wind-felled monsters that caused the greatest hindrance; the branches on the lower side plunged into the earth and supported the main trunk, which resembled a multi-legged monster, the remaining branches clawing out like arms with a hundred crooked spears thrusting upward… . Often Duquet had to crawl beneath these barriers, through leaf mold, fern, toadshade, and viburnum, through slimed fungi, only to encounter another half-decayed giant within a few paces. He could not count all the streams and bogs, the hellish thickets of close-packed larch, the whipping red stems of osier willow. The treetops dazzled. The flashing wings of hundreds of thousands of northward migrating birds beat above him. He saw snowy owls drifting silently through the trees, for they had come into the Maine woods by the thousand that winter and with the turn of the season were retreating to the cold lands.

Is there any documentation of what the forests were actually like then? Does anything of them still exist, or did you have to entirely imagine this landscape?

The idea that North America was covered with an untouched primal forest is a myth, but archeology and mythology, as well as actual accounts, help to bring these forests alive in the mind. Thoreau is often cited as the describer of a pure virgin wilderness (“Maine Woods”), but he never saw that mythical forest. There are hundreds of brief descriptions in old books and documents, and there are tiny remnants of real forest, but it is necessary to put many pieces together to imagine the whole. For example, in doing the research for this book, I was fortunate to visit New Zealand’s Waipoua Kauri Forest sanctuary, where some of the world’s largest ancient trees still survive, though the forest itself has been damaged, its web of life torn. In this forest of great trees, the kiwi bird suffers more than ninety-per-cent mortality, a victim of introduced possums and stoats.

Do the actions of Duquet and his contemporaries have ramifications in other parts of the novel?

Indeed, Duquet’s early impetus persists throughout the novel, expressed through his children and their descendants. He founded the family timber business, which, in the novel, exists to our present day. In counterpoint, René’s descendants drift and are sometimes forced into different lives, gradually absorbed into the white world but always longing for something that has been lost. The contrasting lives and attitudes keep the story ricocheting back and forth through the centuries and places.

This will be your first novel since 2002’s “That Old Ace in the Hole” (though you’ve written a memoir and two story collections since then). Would you call it an environmentalist book? Does it have a message or a goal beyond its literary pleasures?

I would not call it an environmentalist book. The message—if there is one—has to do with irreconcilable and conflicting cultural ways and population growth. There were once thicker forests than now exist, and we, as a species, have cut them down. The reader can supply his or her own message, count what was gained and what was lost. I am more interested in the sweep of interlinking cultures than in messages and morals, and so the story moves from France to New France, to Boston, to the low countries, to China, to Maine, to Michigan and Idaho, to the Pacific Northwest, to New Zealand, to Sumatra.

Above: Lettering by Timothy Goodman and photograph by Grant Cornett.