The stranger, continued

by Lance Tapley

MAKING HEADLINES: Robert Harnum's popularity in France and Quebec has put him on the cover of newspapers and magazines. He's an unknown in his own country.

But he is thoroughly American, too. He played basketball and football at the school he now teaches in. The youngest child of a couple who ran a popular restaurant in Brewer, he spoke only English as a kid, but growing up in a mill town where he could hear French occasionally, knowing that his maternal grandparents had been French Canadian, and hitch-hiking to Quebec as a teenager -- "It was cool being able to drink, and you could pick up beautiful girls if you knew the lingo," he recalls -- he was drawn to major in French at the University of Maine.

He graduated in 1969, a turbulent year. "Never a hippie but a rebel in my own way," he was a student protester "in wing-tip shoes and normal-length hair," he says. After he spent a year obtaining a master's in French at the University of Connecticut, in 1970 he protested the Vietnam War by fleeing the draft and immigrating to Quebec, where he immersed himself not only in the language but also in the cause of Quebec independence, which got him put in jail for a couple of days. He decamped for Toronto, eventually settling on a "subsistence" farm on Prince Edward Island, where, now an official alien, an exile, he began to write.

In 1978 President Jimmy Carter's pardon of draft evaders allowed him back to his homeland. A reporter from the Maine Sunday Telegram interviewed him when he returned, describing him as "struggling now as something of an outcast to regain a place in his hometown community." So now he became a kind of alien at home.

After a couple of years again in graduate school at UConn, he started a very bicontinental dozen years in France and Maine. He first taught English at the university level in the northern part of the country, but he wound up singing and playing the guitar throughout southern France in a rock band that he led -- combined with "horrible" waiting jobs in restaurants back in Bar Harbor during the summer. He moved full-time back to Brewer in the mid-90s.

Unmarried, Harnum lives by himself in a barn hayloft heated with wood on Brewer's Main Street. This talented, sensitive, very bright man seems a bit lonely and anxious about things such as what he eats (not junk food), about his health (he swims and skis to stay in shape), and even about the weather (after all his years in France he fears the French climate is too damp for him).

His biculturalness also is constantly apparent. Compared to Americans, he finds the French more sensual and, at the same time, more intellectual. ("Don't you dare put me down as an intellectual," he warns.) So what's left for the Americans if the French have the sensuality as well as the intellectuality? Well, Americans are more ambitious, he says. After reading The Last Patriot, I don't have the idea that for him this is such a great thing to be -- though he is himself ambitious for his writing.

If anyone does, Harnum understands American and French (and Canadian) cultures equally well. This bi- or tri-culturalness is simply amazing. He writes only in English, but he mostly reads French -- which activity, he says, "purifies my English." His spoken French is so good that he can pass for native. Indeed, his perfect southern-French accent bowls over the French or Quebecois when they discover he is American. It would be like meeting somebody in Brewer who had this wicked Georgia drawl, but he turned out to be a Frenchman who lived in France.

He says he chooses deliberately to speak in the southern French accent because the sound of it is beautiful. (How unusual to choose your accent! What does that mean about your identity? It must be very fluid or divided.)

"He doesn't seem to me to have ever been rooted anywhere," Paule Bolduc, his Canadian publicist, says about him. His French editor, Hélène Almaric, observes that although he fits easily into French society -- he's "extremely analytic," she notes -- she finds her author "typically American in one sense -- those intellectual Americans who can't bear the United States and think they will find in Europe maybe a certain cultural richness."

HARNUM SEES his ties with America, at least with Maine, very differently. "My relationship with Maine is one of love and utter dependence, in the deepest sense," he says. "If it were otherwise my works would take place somewhere else."

But his native country has not yet reciprocated. Almaric finds it "stupefying" Harnum hasn't been published in English. It might have to do with American publishing categories, she proffers: "It isn't commercial fiction or avant-garde." She speculates that novels that don't easily fit these categories are lost in an American publishing industry more and more concentrated in a few large corporations.

But his US literary agent, Rosalie Siegel, agrees with the French and Canadian reviewers that an American publisher hasn't yet accepted The Last Patriot because "it holds a mirror up to America," and the reflection is bleak. "After Columbine no one wanted to read it!" she says. One publisher had been interested in bringing it out, but the company lawyers were worried about kids getting violent ideas from the book and the lawsuits that then might result.

"This has been a very, very strange process," she volunteers. Although a number of major American publishing houses have said no, "I'm not giving up." And his novel in the works excites her. "It's very promising. It's set in Maine during World War 2, and it's beautifully written," she says.

Recently she has been encouraged that Max Films, one of Montreal's most prestigious studios (The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal), has taken an option on The Last Patriot. If the movie comes out, some American publishers tell her, then they might publish the book as a tie-in.

Meanwhile, Bob Harnum is discouraged. He wants the recognition and royalties of American publication, and he wants to spend more time writing. He has signed on for another year at Brewer High School only because "I don't know what I'll do if I don't go back." But "the isolation is terrible" in Brewer, he complains. "I shouldn't be back in my hometown."

He is isolated even in his school. A colleague in the Brewer High School French department, Claudette O'Connor, regrets that almost all of the students and teachers there can't read Harnum's books, although the most advanced French class has read excerpts. She has read them, however, and, speaking of The Last Patriot, comments that such students "do exist in American high schools today."

Pondering his predicament, I wonder how it must feel to have so much of one's life defined by exile, even if self-imposed; and by an alienation in legal, literary, and other senses; and to be so torn among several cultures. I ask him why he doesn't put aside his literary future in this country and just write in French.

"I'm not French!" he responds emphatically. He never could be a creative writer in French, anyway, he says: "The whole sensorial side of a person is formed in childhood."

And his subject is America. He keeps coming back to Brewer, Maine. The latest example of this subject, his work in progress, is "a love story on the coast of Maine à ma manière" -- in my manner. That is, "it has an absurd, existentialist twist," he says.

L'étranger in French means "foreigner" as well as "stranger." Harnum's life and his work -- if The Last Patriot is a good example -- seem to be defined by alienation in one way or another. But for him, painful as this condition may be at times, it is a spring of creativity. His writing is how this existentialist gives meaning to his life.

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Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.