Q&A: Rod Moody-Corbett, Hides

Daniel Davis Wood interviews Rod Moody-Corbett.

Rod Moody-Corbett’s début novel, Hides, is a rare thing: an exploration of masculinity with no time for macho antics. Set against a backdrop of environmental decay and political disillusionment, Hides follows four men who retreat from the world to embark on a week-long hunting trip in the wilderness of Newfoundland. Their motives are equal parts cathartic and supportive. One of the men is riddled with grief, having lost his son in a recent mass shooting; the others, including the narrator, accompany him as a show of solidarity. But the days they spend in company turn out to be more complicated than any of them supposed, fraught with tension and punctuated by one-upmanship, confrontations, recriminations, and the unearthing of deeply buried insecurities.

That said, this all makes Hides sound more sombre than it actually is. It can be bleak, sure enough, but it’s not po-faced; Moody-Corbett takes care to not let the drama descend into melodrama; he lashes it with bitter humour and tempers it with moments of abstraction and surrealism. It also boasts some of the sharpest dialogue you’re likely to find anywhere, and that’s all the more impressive when part of its purpose is to anatomise the evasive silences of the hunters’ words. Following the publication of Hides in the summer, Rod Moody-Corbett spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood to discuss his aims and inspirations, and the place of Hides on the broader territory of literature about masculinity.

3:AM: Hides opens with an epigraph from Herman Melville: “I felt a melting in me.” As well as the way that sentence alone lends its meaning to your novel, your choice of a source—Moby-Dick—calls forth a few juicy themes that you take up. How do you see this sentence from this source speaking to the concerns of Hides?

RMC: I may title my novel Hides, but I make no bones about my loyalties. Moby-Dick is my favourite novel, and by some distance. I don’t know what second place is, but second place is very far off. I read Moby-Dick for the first time in high school (a shabby hardback with illustrations by Warren Chappell and inane annotations on the order of “simile” and “imagery” de moi), and then again (and again) in university. I love it for all the reasons people purport to hate it: too encyclopaedic, too abstruse, too circuitous, too cetaceous, etc. I re-read the novel alongside Elizabeth Hardwick’s Herman Melville and Paul Metcalf’s Genoa early in the drafting of Hides. Hardwick describes Moby Dick as “an antagonist without knowledge of the plot.” Which is sort of how I feel about my narrator. All narrators.

In Moby-Dick, the sentence (which happily enough opens Guy Davenport’s wonderful essay, ‘Ishmael’s Double’) initiates a filial turn in Ishmael and Queequeg’s relations, a moment of tenderness that anticipates (or could be said to anticipate; god knows I’m not the one to mount this argument) my own narrator’s narrower appeasements. But, divorced from this immediate Melvillian context, the sentence takes on (to my ear) a starker temperament. Call it, as Raymond Williams might, a structure of feeling, a ruined mood. Joy Williams’ Ill Nature—title and essays both—encapsulates this mood exactly. A sense of endings, of living in vestiges. And the certainty of all this bundled deep inside the self, the common self.

Now, of course, that’s in Melville, too; and the wary reader, rounding Melville’s eighty epigraphs, every last one of which: essential, needn’t loiter long in Moby-Dick to find it. Three pages in, and Ishmael, with his hypos and Cato and damp, drizzly November in his soul, gives us this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”

The election alluded to by Melville little resembles present degeneracies, but you get the idea. The melting, the me.

3:AM: Of course, an epigraph from Moby-Dick also invokes other themes like masculinity and ambition, especially as they play out in an arena for hunting and slaughter. They’re not made explicit in the epigraph itself, but you’re drawing some energy from Melville’s reservoir.

RMC: Absolutely. Though I should say that there were other epigraphs in the running. A Barthelme, a Beckett. Samuel Johnson defines hide as “the human skin: in contempt.” I like that. But Melville prevailed because I couldn’t dislodge the line from my mind; and, too, because so many of his thematics mirror my own. Not to say that my hunters find themselves engaged in a retributive pilgrimage, thwacking their way through thorny brambles and tuck, in the hopes of felling and flensing (to keep our verbs whalelike) some indomitable caribou, no. But the violence, the companionship, the dulling maleness more generally, the loneliness. At one point, Isaac recalls seeing Giuseppe Penone’s Tree of 12 Metres at the Tate Modern, and the impression this leaves on him somewhat resembles Ishmael’s discovery of a whale skeleton in an Arsacidean wood. Commonalities and Easter eggs abound.

3:AM: One of the most impressive aspects of Hides is the way the novel mediates between particularisation and abstraction. The narrative is set in a particular place at a particular time, in a world that is recognisably ours: the action takes place in coastal Newfoundland, against a context of real-world geopolitical events. But the setup also requires your characters to cut themselves off from affairs outside their own little group: they retreat to an island where they’re forced to hand over their phones, as per the rules of a hermetically-enclosed hunters’ estate known as the Castle—perhaps a nod to Kafka. So it really feels like things are always oscillating between these two poles, these two antipathetic modes of representation. What was it that attracted you to this narrative dynamic?

RMC: The particularities of the geopolitical moment versus the abstracted or faintly surreal feel of the hunt proper—and perhaps, too, the oscillation or dissonance between these two worlds—appealed to me from the first. I knew that I wanted my characters to spend the bulk of the novel away from their technology, their devices, if only to keep myself from writing 600 sentences like “I checked my phone” or “My phone pulsed [buzzed, thrummed, hummed, chirred, whirred, etc.].” Writing off-grid excites me in the same way I imagine suppressing a vowel incentivizes a stumped Oulipian. The constraint interests me, linguistically, insofar as it forces me to move around in other words.

As a reader, I’m drawn to strong descriptive writing: Thomases Hardy and Browne, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Solie, Peter Matthiessen, the Eden Robinson of Monkey Beach and the Marilynne Robinson of Housekeeping. Cormac McCarthy, obviously, the Tennessee novels—Suttree, for me, is the high-water mark. I read greedily of these writers as they compel me to the page. With nature writing, one sometimes risks falling into a kind of delusive lyricism: adjective comma adjective noun. A little of this goes a long way. Probably I prefer descriptions (of bushes and shadows and birds in mid-flight) that tether themselves to a mind or credible witnessing agent: thought through my eyes.

In Malcolm Lowry’s last letter to David Markson (dispatched about a week before Lowry’s death), he offers the young Markson the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever read: “Do you know which stars are which and what bird is flying over your head and what flower blossoming? If you don’t the anguish of not knowing is a very valid field for the artist. Moreover when you learn something it’s a good thing to repossess the position of your original ignorance.” By which I understand Lowry to mean basically this: good to own the app that tells you what shrub is what, what redstart warbles where, but better, artistically, to reinhabit a noticing uncluttered by the most graspable fact. This goes some way in explaining why the sentences of Thomas Browne loom so large for me, particularly as they twist and teem with detail. In The Garden of Cyrus, for instance, you get these stunning images—frog lungs like “two curious bladders not weighing above a grain,” the “pulpy sides” of lupins, the “rudimentall stroaks” of breeding duckweed.

3:AM: You’re saying you feel an urge to particularise the abstract, but maybe not in a verifiable way? So, then, an impulse towards particularisation with poetic license?

RMC: Yes, that’s part of it. Getting into the grit, fleshing things out. An early version situated the action much more concretely in the here and now of 2020 (ish), but—as you can imagine—a fruitless game of Whac-a-Mole soon ensued. I’m not saying that a novelist should abjure the contemporary and avoid taking on weighty subjects, only that, as I drafted, I discovered that my interests lay elsewhere.

I wanted to render the simulated wilderness of The Castle (which, yes, indeed, Kafka; ditto the Muir of Judith Muir) abundantly tactile. I grew up in Newfoundland, lived in St. John’s for most of my life, but wrote the first draft of this novel under lockdown in a small west-facing basement office in southern Alberta roughly 6,000 km afield of its predominant setting. I consulted old hiking books, travel memoirs, field guides. My parents sent me their copy of W.J. Kirwin’s Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a feast of a book. Mootie, spraw-foot, drenty. My geographical displacement proved useful. I can’t seem to write about a place while I’m living in it.

The other aspect that intrigued (and maddened) me involved orchestrating a recognizable present without namechecking every sociopolitical infacility. A federal election occurs in the course of the novel, but we don’t know who runs or wins. Some of the characters are dismayed by the results, though none voted. Protests erupt across the country, while the men junk their phones, take up their guns, and get drunk in the woods. I’m not sure if this particular brand of privileged indifference abounds but it certainly seems plausible.

3:AM: There’s a lot to unpack in any discussion of the relationships between the characters in Hides. That goes firstly for the relationships between the various men. How do you see the power-plays between the men—the jockeying for alpha-male dominance, or else the deferral to a dominant force—going to work on the ways in which they might otherwise relate to one another?

RMC: I see the men of my novel as a thwarted, failing bunch, vindictive and niggling, broadly flawed. They are all grieving (the narrator, a mother; his best friend, a murdered son), and each feel entitled to an ample emotional handout—they want to be looked at and listened to and understood singly—but refuse to extend this want of focus beyond themselves. Money, status, various generational and political disparities, complicate reconciliations, invariably. They are as ill-suited to the times as they are to each other.

My narrator, a lapsed Beckett scholar, booze hound, and perennial sessional, who’d sooner be seen reading Marlen Haushofer or Mircea Cărtărescu than read Haushofer or Cărtărescu (his loss), seems most at home in his unhappiness, locked away in his basement, far away from family and friends. The great Norman Rush in a review of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The Dream of My Return diagnoses these sorts of men as ones who “respond with disaffection, dysfunction, or withdrawal when they are unhorsed or irritated by changing fortunes that the social machine spits out… plunging status, national disgrace, political or religious disillusion, extreme boredom.” Doubtless my narrator sees himself as too proud a member of this camp.

3:AM: And then there’s the relationship between each of these men and the woman who oversees The Castle, Judith Muir. How does her presence skew their relationships to one another?

RMC: Judith skews the singlemindedness of these men in a way that seemed exciting and structurally refreshing if not vital. I admire narratives—novels looking to root themselves, whether in first person or third, in a single voice—that disrupt the performance of their own dominant chronicling by embedding or encoding countervailing voices (or accounts) into their midst: the Ludo sections of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Percival Everett’s Erasure. Here again the appeal comes down to language, an opportunity to graft the oral quirks of secondary characters into the book. I wanted Judith (and to a lesser degree Willis) to inhabit large sections of the text because their voices interested me. There’s a throwaway line near the end of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, where Shreve (that dutiful listener, that total Canadian), interrupting Quentin to take up briefly the telling, says, “Let me play a while now.”

Play. That’s the word for it. A sharing of toys. A passing or smashing of the conch. Just another mead-addled Geat in Beowulf unlocking—per Maria Dahvana Headley’s remarkable translation—​their “word-hoard.”

3:AM: It’s interesting to hear you refer to Judith’s role in structuring the novel. She doesn’t read at all like a structural device; I’d even say that in many ways she’s a character with more dimensions than most of the men around her. We get a decent chunk of her backstory, though not all of it connects causally with her role at The Castle, and at times she seems as ambivalent towards the ethical status of life at The Castle as any of the hunt’s other participants. But as you say, she also does allow an element of play into the novel: there’s a change in atmosphere when she enters. Can you talk to some of the technicalities of defining this character? I’m thinking along the lines of language, as you’ve mentioned, but also gender, desires, power. There must have been a process of chiselling out some lines of distinction between her and the narrator. How did that come to consciousness for you?

RMC: By structural I mean something closer to architecturally integral. Judith was with me from the beginning: my eco-Kurtz of the Great Northern Peninsula. I agree that she exudes more dynamism than most of the men rioting around her, and that she stands in direct opposition to my narrator: celebrated researcher and academic, proleptic and canny, a formidable entrepreneur. She can field dress a caribou (solo) and hold forth sans Google on the etymology of the northern gannet. My narrator’s cynicism sounds a bitter, plaintive note—if the world is disgusting and stupid and doomed, so be it. Judith seems a more active presence. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her hopeful, but distress spurs her into action. She has no time for masculine lassitude.

I delayed reading Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall until I’d completed a draft of Hides. So I can’t quite claim her as an influence, but I see definite affinities between Judith and Haushofer’s narrator. The Wall (which my narrator debates bringing with him on the trip) strikes me as the loneliest of the last-person-on-earth novels and the bravest—better than Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G., better than Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

“If there should come a time when I am without fire, without ammunition,” Haushofer’s narrator confesses near the end of her report, “I shall deal with it and find a way. But now I have other things to do. As soon as the weather turns warmer I shall set about converting the bedroom into Bella’s new byre, and I’ll also manage to break open the door. I still don’t know how, but I’ll definitely find a way. I shall be very close to Bella and the new calf, and shall watch over them day and night. Memories, mourning and fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live.”

Dealing with it and finding a way even if you don’t know how. This seems like Judith all over.

And I had fun writing her, pursuing her bendy digressions. The sentences remain relatively long but the punctuation loosens. The paragraphing changes. Images that might sound ridiculous or overcaffeinated coming from my narrator (oiled-over birds like civet de lièvre anyone?) were suddenly permissible. I remember listening to a recording of Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner (directed by André Gregory) as I was revising the Judith sections and catching myself reading her parts out loud in what I can only begin to describe as a very (very) poor man’s Deborah Eisenberg.

Finally, I would say that it was through Judith that I found a way to articulate without equivocation my novel’s dominant problem: men, or the world of men.

3:AM: As for the men around the narrator, the word that comes to the forefront for me is: repression. Both as sort of a default state for their sense of masculinity, and as the thing they’re compensating for every time they pull the trigger of a firearm. In some ways that’s a given, especially since the narrative set-up frames the hunt as a way of both addressing and not addressing the consequences of a shooting. But I’d like to hear your take on it. What is it that these men can’t say to themselves or one another, that can only be expressed in bullets?

RMC: Yes, there is a silence, a hiddenness, that marks each of these men, a Prufrockian reluctance to “say just what I mean.” They want to confide (and some of the men ultimately do) but they’d be better served if they could articulate their emotional needs more immediately. That they don’t, and prefer, instead, to suffer in proud silence, pampering their resentments, nurturing their wounds and wounded aspects, seems most indicative, to me, of their common sadness.

As for the ineffable? If an unspoken confession lurks slyly within them it might be this: Help me. Simple as that. I am no longer among the well. Send help. Soon.