Released today, Yvette Walker’s debut novel Letters to the End of Love explores three stories of love and loss — one from Cork in 1969, one from the west coast of Australia in 2011 and one from Bournemouth in 1948. In this Q &A, Walker reveals the breathtaking scope of her research for the novel — ranging through Holocaust history, the Stalinist Gulag, Paul Klee’s painting Ad Marginem, the Cork Butter Exchange and much more. She also talks about what inspired her novel’s melancholy and comic elements, including how “the notorious dog” character clicked into place once she realised he hated rock ’n’ roll.

Letters to the End of Love grew out of a story called “Dear Reader”, joint winner of HQ magazine Short Story Competition in 2003. Did the story or characters refuse to let go of you or did something else happen that convinced you that a novel needed to be born from the story’s material?

Sometime after the story was published I was re-reading it and I realised that there was a map of sorts within it — that I had sketched out the bones of a novel. It was a gut feeling really, a hunch which told me I could go deeper. It took a few more years to really understand what that map actually meant though — there were many false trails and dead ends!

Which characters in Letters to the End of Love feature in “Dear Reader”?

The narrator is an earlier version of Grace — she works in a first hand bookshop and has just broken up with her girlfriend. The narrator is reading a fictional memoir written by an English doctor decades after the Second World War, so unnamed versions of both John and David appear in the story.

You were chosen to be a recipient of the Eleanor Dark Varuna Flagship Fellowship in 2009 and of the Varuna Publishers Fellowship in 2012. What did these times staying at Varuna mean to you? How did it help the manuscript that is now Letters to the End of Love take flight?

Varuna is an astounding place. It’s difficult to describe, as its powers are mysterious. The spirit, the ethos of Eleanor Dark is the unacknowledged mid-wife of many of the finest Australian novels from the past twenty years or so. I worked harder and faster at Varuna than at any other time in my writing life — long-standing and difficult problems with the manuscript were solved there. I felt welcomed into the Australian writing community, into its history and its contemporary concerns. Oh and there is something magical in Sheila’s cooking too. And the never-ending biscuit tin.

The Cork letters from the late ’60s reveal the relationship between Irish novelist, Caithleen, and a Russian painter, Dmitri, as they face his fatal illness. The Perth letters from 2011 explore the breakdown and possible mending of the relationship between Louise and Grace. The Bournemouth letters are from John to his dead lover David. The epistles are all elegies of sorts. What drew you to this mournful form?

As a lament for the Beloved, the elegy was the perfect way to talk about the loss of love, be that romantic love or familial love. It seemed at the beginning almost foolhardy to attempt a novel so melancholic, but then the comic elements of the story began to show themselves and I felt that the two elements together would balance things.

In a conference paper from 2009 you said that you used the epistolary structure to focus on “a philosophical exploration of the disintegrating subject, the grieving ‘I’ in a world blown apart but moving forward in time.” What did you learn about grief or what were you able to express about grief already encountered in your own life, from writing about it so intensely for so long?

I wanted to articulate grief not as a stage, or a process, but as an ever-present part of the human soul, something always there, perhaps quite silent and subtle most of the time, but something which remains in the body and the spirit all our lives. Not morbidly, but simply as a mark of our humanity. In writing this book, and in encountering the different types of grief each character carries, I feel I was able to understand my own grief in a deeper way, and perhaps come to terms with its presence a little more.

In that same 2009 conference paper you wrote that through the letters of John Carpenter, in Bournemouth in 1948, to his lover David Pabst (who died in Flossenberg concentration camp in 1940) you had written a Holocaust narrative. Was it the fact that you knew of only three memoirs which documented the experience of gay men in the camps or something else that led you to tackle this ambitious task?

It was not a conscious choice, or even a political one. But once the story began to take shape the political consequences of what I was writing became apparent. I almost gave up several times as the task seemed beyond me, and the actual reality of internment was so heart breaking I struggled greatly with writing anything of worth or value. I suppose what spurred me on (and this sounds a little strange) is that I felt a moral responsibility towards the character I had created: I could not leave John in so much pain. I had to let him tell his story. It is a fictional story though, and has to be treated in a different way to the actual Holocaust testimonies. They carry the real history of the gay men who suffered under National Socialism. I consider John and David’s story to be a fictional contemplation of this real suffering.

You have focused deliberately on aspects of John and David’s life together before the war. Why did you research and write up details of David’s internment but then decide that these should largely remain below the surface of the narrative?

I undertook to first research the Shoah — the Jewish Genocide — as best I could in the amount of time I had, and then I undertook to research the particular suffering of homosexual men in the labour camps. Then I did further reading on Holocaust literature. After all of that consideration I came to several conclusions (as many of the scholars, historians and philosophers I encountered did before me). Firstly, that the reality of internment cannot truly be understood by those who did not experience it. Secondly, that language itself is inadequate to describe the horrors of that particular universe. I decided I could not, for ethical reasons, attempt to recreate what it was like to be interned. As a fiction writer I believe that any re-creation of that world can only be attempted by those who have faced those experiences and lived. My reading of the Holocaust memoirs of Charlotte Delbo helped me come to this understanding.

Dmitri’s story about how his brother Viktor was taken away in a Black Maria, sent to Solovetsky Islands, then walked to the Arctic is told very beautifully. The link between the whiteness of the landscape and the whiteness of Dmitri’s painting has a marvellous consonance. What alchemy led to Viktor’s story and the image coming together in your imagination?

It was quite clear at the beginning of that story that Dmitri had taken on a task which was possibly beyond him: a massive white painting which would take him years to complete. From that point on, when I sat down to write the painting sessions I had no idea what was going to happen: I ‘followed’ Dmitri’s lead, a little like the notorious dog I suppose! In writing through Dmitri’s painting process I came to understand what that painting represented. There is also something in the fact that white contains everything and nothing at exactly the same time. The idea of Viktor walking out of the Siberian camp and into the Arctic was inspired by an autobiography I read by an American man called Alexander Dolgun who had been tortured and interrogated by the Soviet secret police in the 1948. He kept himself sane by measuring his prison cell, then calculating how far it was to walk from Moscow to New York, then he set about walking up and down his cell, determined to walk until he ‘reached’ New York.

Caithleen and Dmitri’s dog plays a vital role in helping us to understand Dmitri’s art but he is also wonderfully “doggy” and your description of him and the other animals in the novel provide light relief. How hard was it to get the animals right?

All of the animals (except the notorious dog) are based on real animals so I just had to amplify their real personalities. They were a joy to write and (surprisingly) not difficult to get right at all. Well, the notorious dog proved a bit of a challenge up until the point I realised that he hated rock ’n’ roll — that gave me the window into his personality that I needed.

One of my favourite passages in the novel is the bookshop scene in which Grace fantasises about “the man who buys Wembley Ware at Trinity Antiques, is fitted for a Paul Smith suit at Parker’s, then comes into the bookshop and purchases Grace’s first edition Ulysses”. I have read that you work in a seaside bookshop. What fantasies about the purchasing habits of your customers do you allow yourself to entertain?

Well, what people buy always surprises me. I peg someone as a light reader and they bring some nineteenth century classic to the counter. I think someone is a reader of literary works and they want Barbara Taylor Bradford. My only fantasy is that my customers will all turn back into browsers again, instead of what most of them do now, which is pick up new fiction in record time — like it’s a bucket of chicken. So when anyone takes their time in the bookshop and cranes their neck to look at the shelves, I want to give them a free book.

I also enjoyed Caithleen’s description of the changes her grandfather saw in relation to getting his butter to market first by cart, then by rail and lastly through the co-op. I especially enjoyed that tiny detail you include about the first butter wrapper “featuring an Irish wolfhound standing on a little hill, with the words Free Irish State Butter stamped into the earth”. I’m presuming this detail came from your visit to the Cork Butter Factory. Even if it didn’t, how did you determine that this part of Caithleen’s story needed to be told?

Well, the Cork Butter Museum was a fascinating place. I got very caught up in the history of Irish butter, and the amazing power that the Cork Butter Exchange had for over 150 years. And that butter wrapper with the Irish wolfhound stamped on it does exist, it’s in the museum and I bought home a postcard of it. I wanted to give Caithleen an ordinary Cork backstory, something I could thread through the narrative without too much complication. When I saw that butter wrapper I knew I had to follow the butter story.

Your book is deeply philosophical. What is it you would ideally like people to understand about love and suffering from reading your book?

Oh I think it’s up to them what they take away from the book. My only hope it that the book succeeds as a space to contemplate love and suffering — that is what all the books that I love and can’t be parted from succeed in doing. And every time I return to them I find something more, something I hadn’t seen before. I hope my book can do this for people.

Towards the end of the novel you have Grace writing to Lou using a typewriter in a café and about which Grace says: “the blood and muscle of a typewriter, is a beautiful thing”. She also says it is a long time since the typewriter helped to win wars. The mechanics and implements of writing feature at various times in the novel and readers are made aware that there have been technological shifts. What point, if any, were you trying to make about history or writing or perhaps both in doing this?

The typewriter is the writing machine that in my lifetime has been surpassed firstly by the computer and then by the smartphone. Driving language through a digital corral has changed not only what we write but also how we think and of course one feeds the other. I am wary of new technologies mostly because I believe that language itself is changing and mutating at such a speed that we have no time to contemplate what we are doing. As a writer I am naturally suspicious of devices which want to abbreviate, truncate and summarise. So the novel can also be seen as an elegy to the handwritten word; to the off-line writer; to the writing mind not embedded in the internet.

The backstory relating to your extensive research for Letters to the End of Love was almost as intriguing to me as the novel itself. Where did the research trail begin and were you surprised where it led you?

The research began where everything begins for me — with books. From the books I moved on to the kindness of strangers, as the acknowledgments at the back of the book illustrate. Although I had limited time in both Ireland and England (my trip to Germany was curtailed by the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud) what I brought back home with me was crucial to the success of the book. I couldn’t write while I was in Cork or Bournemouth as I was too focused on “getting the facts” so to speak. What was interesting about that process was that when I came home, it was the seemingly incidental elements of the journey which had the most resonance. I am also possibly the only person to have ever gotten sunstroke in Ireland (true story).

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh was an early literary influence. What and who is now?

In no particular order: Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Anne Michaels, Colm Tóibín, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, J.D. Salinger (but not Catcher in the Rye), Graham Greene, Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Charlotte Wood, Cate Kennedy, Georgina Harding, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Edward St Aubyn.

Letters to the End of Love by Yvette Walker is published by UQP, 2013, $22.95