“I Refused to Be a War Bride.” Or, Why I Set My Novels in Nova Scotia

They are all in their graves now, but late in the winter of 1979, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I recorded conversations with six women who, in 1938, shortly before Canada’s entry into WWII, arrived on three different steamers from Europe, ostensibly to be war brides. Their matrimonial contracts were signed on the basis of a photograph of their prospective husband or a letter from their prospective husband. Their Atlantic passage was paid for in advance. All but two were of Dutch ancestry.

We made roughly six hours of recordings. Each of their stories made for a vivid portrait of intolerable circumstances at home: fear, exile, doubt, fortitude. But in the end, they all had one thing in common. Once arrived to Pier 21 in Halifax, they each refused to be a war bride. The consequences of this refusal were strikingly varied. Several women spent time in jail.

But I was perhaps especially mesmerized by the narrative of Sophe Apperlo, which in part read:

My fellow’s name was Paul Middler. I noticed him when I got about half-way down the gangplank. His photograph was accurate. At that moment, I remember thinking, “Life is about to become painful. You must be honest and unafraid.” How difficult would it be to refuse this Paul Middler than had I stayed in Holland as a Jew. Yet Paul Middler had financed my journey. He had expectations, of course. I walked directly up to him. I was holding his photograph. The woman I soon learned was his sister stood next to him. He was nicely dressed. He reached out to take my suitcase but I wouldn’t allow it. This startled him. I had practiced in English and now said, “I refuse to be a war bride.” I thought, what will happen now. Right away his sister grabbed his arm and took him aside. She spoke to him. It was as if his sister understood everything with one look. But Paul Middler looked as if he couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know if out of anger or what. My heart beat fast. I was surrounded by the commotion of the harbor, the noise, the shouting, voices.

As Paul then approached me, his sister stood close behind. “Do you understand the word disappointment?” he said. “Yes, I’ve had some of my own,” I said. His sister stepped back. He held out an envelope which he then placed in my hand. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “This life is impossible for you, isn’t it?” I said yes it is. He said, “You see, we might have gotten along.” I said that I would work to pay him what I owed him. I’m not charity.” He shook his head no, then walked away. His sister said, “The Baptist Spa Rooming House. They take Jews. If you have your papers. The Baptist Spa Rooming House. Go there now.” The envelope had money in it. She was sobbing. The sister was, I think for her brother. She caught up with him. I thought, the world is cruel but what a generous thing. I was this small person in the shadow of that enormous steamer. This is how it was on that day.

I’m working on a book that includes these remarkable women. If you dig deep enough, if you are stalwart in your researches, if you talk to people, every place reveals its past. But I have preferred to do these things in Nova Scotia. So that when someone says, “Why did you place your novel in the Canadian Maritimes?” I immediately feel I’ve failed in some way—if the book had come alive, there would be no reason for such a question.

I think that good writing is good writing; it is not about a writer’s identity but about one’s gift as a writer, or lack of a gift.

Every sentence is a conscious decision, every passage of dialogue, every description of landscape and weather, every bit of historical eavesdropping. As obvious as it sounds, therefore the story could not have been set anywhere else. For Come to the Window, published this month, I studied a photograph of a beached whale in 1918, in the village of Parrsboro along the Bay of Fundy, where the novel is partly set. I pored over church records; I pored over court records. I read dozens of accounts of “unsolved” murders.

But in the end, for me, writing the novel was a sustained act of narrative displacement; I brought my research back to my home in Vermont and wrote the novel in my farmhouse there. Every day, the photographs, notebooks, journals materialized Nova Scotia in 1918, like a two year-long séance.

For five decades Nova Scotia has been a place I have discovered astonishing stories. And sometimes when someone—especially in Canada—asks, “Why Nova Scotia?” I get the feeling the actual question they’re asking is, “As an American writer, why set your books in Nova Scotia?” And this speaks to the elusive, and at times painfully redundant, concept of provenance. I simply think that good writing is good writing; it is not about a writer’s identity but about one’s gift as a writer, or lack of a gift.

As Zadie Smith wrote, “No geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject… only interest, knowledge and love will do that.” As for the insistences of provenance, allow me to say that I admire Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novels; I’m so grateful she wrote them, even though she has never lived in the future years in which they are set; her imagination sets readers there with an immediacy that one also finds in H.G. Well’s The Time Machine.

Thoreau famously said, “I have traveled widely in Walden.” I have lived and traveled widely in Nova Scotia. That brooding weather, that jig-saw coastline, that history writ large, the fundamental strangeness of life that can be discovered in Nova Scotian folklore but also personal anecdote—all of it, all of it, all of it—I have found, as a writer, astonishingly generous. I set most of my novels in Nova Scotia because it is the place my narrative imagination is most inspired.

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