“Memory became the most sinuous storyteller of all. Washing away the statistical infirmities, chronology, month and year, age,” writes Neil Besner in his new memoir Fishing with Tardelli: A Memoir of Family in Time Lost (2022).
Born in Montreal and raised in Brazil, Neil Besner has spent his career writing and teaching Canadian literature. He taught at the University of Winnipeg from 1987 until his retirement in 2017, where he held several senior administrative roles, including Dean of Humanities, Dean of Arts, and Associate Vice President, to name a few. He has spent most of his academic career writing about Canadian literature, the short story, and the works of Elizabeth Bishop, and has published books on Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, along with numerous articles on short stories and poetry. In addition to his academic and literary expertise, Besner is also a skilled singer-songwriter.
Fishing with Tardelli is a concise yet rich memoir that deals with memory, family, trauma, and love. At only 148 pages, each sentence is perfectly crafted to draw readers into the tales Besner shares about four influential parental figures — his biological mother and father, step-father, and fishing companion, Tardelli. Each section of the book offers fragmented snapshots of the complex familial relationships of the Besner family, documenting both the gentle, joyous memories as well as the grief-stricken and scornful moments. Besner’s words reveal how time bleeds together, how these strong familial bonds leave lasting memories and emotions in our lives, and how these four influential figures have impacted him to this day.
Alicia Beggs-Holder and Faye Hamidavi attended the Fishing with Tardelli book launch at the Toronto Arts & Letters Club and later interviewed Besner about his memoir.
ABH & FH: Can you tell us a bit about your journey to becoming a writer?
NB: I began keeping a sporadic journal when I was in my early teens, and I often return to it for material, for recorded memories, lists, fragments, and so on. I began seriously writing in my late teens/early twenties as a songwriter. I wrote maybe 40 songs over a ten-year period and performed in coffeehouses in Montreal and elsewhere beginning in the early 70s. Intermittently over the next 30 years, I wrote poems and short stories, but apart from songwriting, most of my writing from the mid-70s to around 2015 was literary criticism, and some translation from Portuguese into English. I wrote a bad autobiographical novel in my late 20s; unfortunately, it survives in the University of Manitoba archives along with other papers. I started another novel about 20 years ago but abandoned it after about 80 pages and extensive notes. It survives at home. I never throw anything out. The first novel was imitation Saul Bellow, the second, imitation Mavis Gallant. Too much influence from the subjects of my Master’s and PhD, respectively. My poetry has been, in the main, weak. A few published poems, and a few good lines here and there. A few good songs early on. I have great respect for literary criticism and I guess I am a competent critic and editor, but since I was 15 I have wanted to write song lyrics, fiction, memoirs, and so on. It just took a longish time for me to get to the memoir. I am still learning. I still feel like an apprentice, and that’s fine.
ABH & FH: From authors like Margaret Atwood to characters like Saul Bellow’s King Dahfu, your memoir is filled with intertextual references. Did any of these figures serve as inspiration for you while crafting this memoir? How so?
NB: I was surprised at first when all the literary references arose. (In an early version of the memoir there were some 20 epigraphs, ranging from an excerpt from Eliot’s Four Quartets to nursery rhymes — “Row, row, row your boat…”) My first impulse was to “fold everything in” — that’s the way I put it to myself as I wrote drafts — I meant song lyrics, references to pop culture, to literature, to philosophy, to film, and so on. I wanted to demystify “literature,” to make the literary references seamless and above all accessible to the average reader. I did not want the memoir to be accessible only to a literary audience — on the contrary. I don’t know if I was successful in this aim. (One review advises that the memoir seems aimed at fellow litterateurs. That bummed me out.) Did any of these writers serve as inspiration? Yes, many of them. Beginning and ending with Proust, but including Bellow and Atwood. And García Márquez. I wanted to make reading a subject of the memoir, in addition to the more transparent subjects — my parents, my family, memory, and time. I wanted to collapse distinctions between “literary” writers (Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Lowry, Elizabeth Bishop et al.) and other more “popular” writers and songwriters (Damon Runyon, Crystal Gayle, John Irving, for example), and between poetry and prose. I wanted the literary references to arise naturally.
ABH & FH: You’ve stated that you began writing this memoir 20 years ago. What made you decide that now is the right time to share this story?
NB: This is a long story. I found an entry in my journal from 2014 that advises that “Yes. This is the form for me,” referring to memoirs. (I had recently read Joe Fiorito’s excellent memoir about his father, The Closer We Are to Dying.) Another starting point for the memoir was in 1971, at McGill, when I wrote a short piece entitled, mawkishly, “Ocean Days,” about fishing in the bay in Rio with a character named Severiano (a version of Tardelli). But this memoir has many origins, many starting points: my journal; other reading (including other memoirs); “real life,” as they say; failed novels.
Why now? I retired in 2017 after a forty-plus-year career teaching Canadian literature, the last thirty at the University of Winnipeg. I began fumbling with this memoir in Brazil in January 2018. The pandemic helped, perversely; in enforced isolation during the summer of 2020, I wrote what became the published version. Another factor, to be sure, was that Tardelli and my parents had been long gone, save for my stepfather, who died in Rio in January 2022 at 99 and eight months. (He read the first chapter.) But the perspective I had gained since 1991 — the year Tardelli died — is in itself an important subject of the memoir. I wanted to write about memory circling through time. I don’t think that as a young man I could have done that as fully.
ABH & FH: The book starts with two very contradictory epigraphs — a quote by Elizabeth Bishop that reads, “of course I may be remembering it all wrong after, after — how many years?” and one by Philip Roth that reads, “you must not forget anything.” Why did you want readers to go into your memoir with these conflicting lines in mind?
NB: I wanted these epigraphs to frame the memoir because they embody two (apparently) contradictory but vital truths about memory. The first is the opening lines from Bishop’s luminescent poem “Santarém.” The experience the poem evokes is Bishop’s 1960 boat trip down the Amazon to the town of Santarém on the Tapajós River, but she only published the poem in the late seventies (she died in 1979). The opening lines invoke memory, but also, immediately, its fallibility after “all these years.” For Bishop, memory is vitally necessary but fallible; in this poem, she goes on to summon, in magically precise detail, that remembered 1960 scene.
The second epigraph is the closing line from Philp Roth’s brilliant 1996 memoir about his father, Patrimony. His invocation, “You must not forget anything,” is a command to the living: in the end, memory is much of what we have. Memory and love. You must remember everything — even as you acknowledge that you might well be getting it “all wrong” after, after how many years? The past must not become a completely foreign country. We live, in large part, through what (and how) we remember. Not to become immured in the past, but to become more fully present, we must remember. That’s why I quote the epigraph (page 82) of the Colombian sorcerer, García Márquez, to his 2003 memoir, Living to Tell the Tale: “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Amen.
ABH & FH: During your book launch, you said that you tried to be “brutally concise” while writing this book. What was your process for condensing a decades-long story into 148 pages?
NB: It was Mavis Gallant — a fine writer sadly neglected these days — who remarked, “Most of my work is cutting.” I tried to pare early drafts, continually, by reducing longer episodes to scenes related to each other through memory, through spare repetition that echoed. I wanted the segments to call to each other across time — not chronologically but through intuition and association. Reverie. I hoped that coherence would arise through the voice invoking the past. I tried to temper chronology with lateral association. That’s also the way my mind works.
And I wanted the writing to be a counterpoint to Proust and his three thousand plus pages. I love Proust — I read Remembrance of Things Past in the two years before writing the memoir — but I wanted to achieve something like his effect differently, to find out if that were possible. And I wanted to write against my more natural tendency to write expansively. I did not want the memoir to billow.
ABH & FH: Were there any stories or memories you wish you could have fit into the memoir but had to sacrifice for the sake of being concise?
NB: There were some. I wanted to write more fully about the 45 days on the cargo ship in July and August 1965. And there were many memories left out, finally, from every section. I tried to intuit which memories cohered, formed larger patterns, implied longer stories.
ABH & FH: Each section of the book is written as a series of fragmented scenes, some several pages long and others as short as a few sentences. How did you decide on this method of organizing the sections? Was it always how you intended to write the memoir or was it an editorial choice?
NB: The method evolved as I wrote. Soon it became inevitable, or so it seemed to me. But I cannot recall at what stage this occurred. I wanted the scenes to cohere through a layering that subverted or complemented the plodding chronology of “and then, and then.”
ABH & FH: You write painstakingly about your relationship with each parental figure in your life. What was your process for choosing which stories to share? Were you more interested in authentically portraying the real subjects or in creating a narrative that best represented your relationship with each one?
NB: It was difficult to choose material. There was too much in each case. I wanted at once to portray the real subjects, and to narrate episodes that truly occurred; but yes, I was also intent on selecting representative episodes to characterize each relationship. Of course, these relationships are portrayed through my eyes alone. Although Dona Judite and Senhor Valter had much to say about each other, I was careful in selecting their perceptions.
ABH & FH: Were you nervous about your family members reading this memoir? How have they responded to it?
NB: I was a bit nervous, but they have responded very generously. I have been pleasantly surprised.