Where exactly in the mind and spirit of a military history buff lurks the creative teller of erotic love tales? As a longtime television and radio producer focusing on historical programs, Gilbert Reid’s career begs this question. Having just read his short story collection So This is Love, I set out to ask him about this seemingly obvious dichotomy.
I catch Reid working on Striking Back, a CBC-TV follow-up to the successful For King and Country, a series that looked back at Canada’s involvement in World War I. Despite the technical demands of producing, Reid swiftly transports himself to the world of the traveler, philosopher, and lover that narrates So This is Love.
“I find that in the short story you can create a whole world, maybe even as rich as that in a novel. There’s an intensity to the short story which I like a lot, and a discontinuity that corresponds to our shifting views of the world today,” he explains.
The shifting worlds of Reid’s stories are ruled by a love that is strikingly physical. Its objects of desire are idealized, making them sometimes beautiful, and sometimes perverse.
“If we really saw everything as a cold reality, we probably wouldn’t procreate,” Reid quips. “Desire is an idealization-you see all sorts of qualities in people that are quite magical. I see a sort of a magic in appreciating the human form.”
Some of his stories, like “Irony Is…” have provoked reaction from literary critics for their nonchalant sexual perversity. Reid, however, is quite comfortable challenging sexual parameters, his own having been broadened by the long years he spent living overseas.
“Here [in Canada] we tend to undervalue the sensual richness of humanity, but in Latin countries it has not been entirely lost.” Laughing, he adds, “There’re a lot of advantages of the strict Puritan Nordic thing, but it would be nice to get a bit of both.”
“Pavilion 24,” a modern-day Romeo and Juliet tale nominated for Best Fiction at this year’s Canadian Magazine Awards, is somewhat of an amalgamation of Reid’s “day job” political and historical interests, and his storytelling passions. By setting the story in a war-torn Bosnian hospital, Reid explores “in a semi-fantasy mode what it means for people who have no real reasons whatsoever to be enemies-who in fact could be lovers, husband and wife, or the best of friends-to become enemies.”
Despite his hectic career as a producer, Reid plans to follow up So This is Love with a novel, and hopefully, with more short stories.
“Of course, there is the tension that arises when I’m immersed in a whole bunch of historical stuff… But when I’m writing, I’m in a very different mental space,” he notes. “You know, the kind where you see a girl walking down the street, or the tide coming in, and right there, you’ve got a short story.”
