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Actor and author R.H. Thomson. Courtesy of R.H. Thomson
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In ‘By the Ghost Light,’ R.H. Thomson Continues His Quest to Remember the Lost Boys
In a Q&A with the Canadian actor about his book, he talks about his personal connection to the Great War and why it took him six years to write it / BY Ian Coutts / October 26th, 2023
In his first non-fiction book, By the Ghost Light: War, Memories, and Family, beloved Canadian actor R.H. Thomson asks what we remember about war and why. It’s a complex work, one that builds on Thomson’s personal project to commemorate all the soldiers who died in the First World War before they are forgotten. To a great degree, his family inspired the quest: on his father’s side, five great-uncles served, and two died in the war and two in the 20s and 30s from the after-effects of poison gas; on his mother’s side, three great-uncles died, too. The letters the five great-uncles wrote from the front formed the basis for his 2002 play, The Lost Boys, which, in turn, inspired the book. Thomson was also heavily involved in the 2008 Vigil Project, where all 68,000 names of Canadian soldiers who died in the Great War were projected on buildings over the course of a week, and The World Remembers, his ambitious, ongoing attempt to gather the names of more than nine million combatants, on both sides, who died in the First World War.
In his book, Thomson suggests we have banished the horror and carnage of the Great War from our minds because it is so disquieting, and “many of our remembrance rituals at city halls and cenotaphs, however honourably conducted … have contributed to … forgetting.”
The name of the book, which comes out Oct. 31, is taken from the theatre world, where a light is always left burning on stage through the night to prevent people from pitching off the edge in the dark, and, some think, to ward off ghosts that haunt the space.
When I met with Thomson, he had the slightly glazed expression of a man who has just been released from an isolation chamber, which was more or less the case. For weeks in August leading up to our interview, he had been trapped in a darkened, soundproof recording studio at Penguin Random House Canada, narrating By the Ghost Light for the audiobook.
Ian Coutts: If you had to describe By the Ghost Light, what would you say?
R.H. Thomson: Wars, memories, family. It’s not a linear book. It’s a bit of a mosaic. My hope and trust is that the reader begins to see the pieces all belong to the same canvas. It’s here, it’s there; it goes back to Versailles; it goes to my family; it goes back to Berlin and Belgrade and 1862 and smallpox. But really, why do we tell stories, whose stories, and what purpose do stories tell?
IC: What was your reaction when Martha Kanya-Forstner and Scott Sellers at Penguin Random House asked you to write the book?
RHT: ‘Are you kidding? Okay, this is where I want it to go. This is not going to be a book of family history.’ I didn’t want to do that.
IC: But you do talk about your family.
RHT: My family history gave me a door into this and that. It’s not meant to be about me. For everyone who’s reading this, it’s about their stories, their families, their letters, thinking about the structures of what was told to them. Like I said with The Lost Boys, I don’t really care about the play, I cared about the people who turned up afterwards. Go pull out the letter, pull out the photo; go talk to Great Aunt Mary, who’s the story keeper. Go and remember.
IC: At one point in the book, you say a lot of the ceremonies surrounding Remembrance Day actually have the effect of helping us forget, not remember. How would you do them differently?
RHT: It’s not for me to make it up. I was never in combat. I think the people who were in combat, from all sides, should make these ceremonies. People in the forces, I guess. I would put together some remaining veterans, some veterans from Bosnia [and say,] “Okay, let’s talk where should we be going with this?”
IC: Will you be at a cenotaph yourself?
RHT: Probably not. If the Toronto Public Library phones and says, “will you do something?”, I’ll say, “yeah, we can have some readings.” But I’ll make sure we have a French reading, a German reading, a Canadian reading. No more us. I don’t do that anymore. I think it’s not a useful direction any longer.
IC: You also suggest in By the Ghost Light that, in the future, we should name the soldiers who died in the Second World War, too. But it was very different than the First World War. Do we really want to honour the sort of people who fought in the SS or were hardcore Nazis?
RHT: Honour and remember very different words. I don’t quite get the connection. Remembering is different than honouring. You have to steer through language. Should you remember the guy in the SS who was a sadistic f–cker? You have to ask the questions. If you don’t, you’re continuing to fuel the cycle. We have got to take the fuel out of the cycle somehow. That’s my point. But you can’t do it until everyone’s dead.
IC: Let’s talk about the writing. You’re not a writer by training. Did your theatrical background help you in any way?
RHT: It’s two different sets of instincts. In a book, a printed page is information. It’s signaling where the story’s going. I’m looking for a different way for the reader to engage in where we’re going, speaking from a position of great ignorance. Scripts give you clues. I’m used to how dramatists work – Wajdi Mouawad and David Young – and I love doing them, because you never know where you’re going. You’re not fed the narrative story. That’s [like] a lot of TV writing [and] movie writing, where the audience is a consumer, not a participant. That’s a lot of, ‘I don’t trust my audience to have a creative impulse.’ In the theatre, they are a participant, therefore I’m not going to fill in all the little bits. You start participating. Unconsciously, that’s what I wanted to do. Otherwise, I’d be writing a manual for water pumps. [Brightens] Do you want to write a book about water pumps?
IC: Did you create any sort of routine?
RHT: I’ve been living, ‘do it every day, every time, you keep writing.’ That’s the only routine I had. Let your fingers move before your brain does.
IC: You met up with Doug Gibson, the former publisher of McClelland & Stewart, and an author in his own right?
RHT: At a party. “I hear you’re writing a book,” he said. “Well, if I can be of any help.” He became a very useful lamppost. I’d send him stuff. “Doug, am I totally nuts?” “No. not totally nuts. Keep going.”
IC: For most of August, you’ve been in a studio recording the audiobook version. You’ve done audiobooks, before but not your own book. What has that been like?
RHT: Not easy. A lot of stuff is surfacing [like the poem] High Flight. I learned it in Grade 6. I read it for the book, and I’m breaking into tears. I realized it’s not a poem about flying, it’s about death.
IC: How long did you work on By the Ghost Light?
RHT: [Thomson holds up six fingers for the number of years.] You never think you’re going to get anywhere. You think, ‘why am I doing this? This isn’t good.’ The fact that I had a contract, that I had to deliver something to these guys – good or bad, up or down – that was pushing it along. I didn’t know where I was going. At one point, Scott started saying, “I think we have a book here, Robert,” and those pieces keep you going.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.