Mixed Media: David Lowery & Russell Banks

On a sharp winter morning, just before the onset of a European tour, David Lowery, frontman for Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, calls writer Russell Banks, author of such works as Cloudsplitter, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter and new novel The Darling. The two have never met, but both share a passion for storytelling and truth in fiction.

DL:So you’re home in the Adirondacks?
RB:Yeah, well I’m not actually in the house, I’m in the studio. It’s a renovated old sugar shack for boiling down maple sap into maple syrup. And it’s about 150, 200 yards from the house. It’s where I hole up.

DL:Oh that’s good. I can’t work in my house. I go to my studio. I have two boys now, and I used to be able to work at home in the basement, but they know I’m there. They’re too informed. And they go in the corner of the dining room, where they know I can hear them, and they’re like, ‘DADDY!’ Sometimes I pretend to leave, get in the van. I drive around the block and sneak in the back door of the basement. Then as soon as I turn on a CD it’s, ‘Daddy!’ I’ve had quite a few friends who’ve read your books, but I had a minor role in a movie called River Red that took place in New Hampshire, and the director gave everybody copies of your book Affliction to read. But I don’t wanna get too dark here right off the bat…
RB:That’s a pretty dark story. Did you see the film?

DL:Yeah, they did a really good job … I was surprised. I saw the film after [I read the book]. Nick Nolte was perfect. I think they got him at the perfect point in his career to play Wade Whitehouse. The story is narrated by Wade’s brother. They both had a rough, sort of working class upbringing. So you have Wade and Wade’s brother who ends up going to college, and is a college professor…
RB:I first started writing the book because I wanted to tell the story of Wade. But brother Rolf didn’t exist in the first version until I got about 150 pages in and realized I couldn’t tell Wade’s story from up close in a sympathetic way, because he was so inarticulate and seemed too much a victim unless I could somehow get another dynamic into the story. Then I realized there’s an equal and opposite reaction to this kind of abuse and alcoholism in a family. One either replicates the behavior or goes to the exact opposite and is like a teetotaler and just doesn’t get involved in any relationships that put them in danger, or anything repeating his father’s pattern. In my family, that was the case.

DL:Do you have siblings?
RB:Yeah, I had two brothers—one is dead now—and a sister. And my brother went far away as he could from ever being in a situation where he might repeat the behavior of our father. And I constantly put myself in the situation where I could repeat the behavior of my father in order to correct it. So, in that sense, I needed both brothers, both stories to balance each other and make it a family drama. But it’s not autobiographical in a literal sense. I did grow up in a family marred by alcoholism and violence, but I didn’t think I was telling my story. If anything, I was trying to tell my father’s story and my grandfather’s story.

DL:It’s more interesting to exaggerate the fact for fiction…
RB:My story’s boring to me. It’s not too interesting an autobiography. But my father’s story was fascinating to me, because it was a way of forgiving him and understanding him and seeing the struggle he went through.

DL:He had a similar relationship like Wade had with his father?
RB:Exactly. And it probably goes back to my grandfather with his father, these things tend to be like DNA. Once they get in the family, they stay.

DL:So let’s flash forward to the new novel. You come from a New England background, and New Hampshire’s gotta be—I’m not really sure, but when I’ve driven through it, it seems like—one of the whiter states in the Union. But you’ve suddenly become fascinated with either Caribbean immigrants or Caribbean people, or Africans or African Americans. What started that?
RB:It wasn’t really sudden. It’s actually been a part of my life. It goes back to when I left home. I was eighteen years old and I was hitchhiking south. I ended up in Florida, and looked around and realized I was in a different world. I was in a world that was both white and black. It was 1958, so I’m sure you know what it was like down there. I was actually on my way down to join Fidel [Castro] in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the winter of ’58. I thought I was going to go down and… I had a romantic view—and I still do in some ways—of Fidel and Che [Guevara] and the boys in the mountains.

DL:My father was an Air Force officer, and I remember my mother telling me Fidel was out there, and that really frightened me. A lot of people were thinking he was going to come in…
RB:Oh, you bet. He was on the cover of Life magazine. They called him, ‘Dr. Castro’ because he had a doctorate in law, and he was treated with respect and was quite a romantic figure. And so I thought what he really needed was an 18-year-old American kid who couldn’t speak Spanish, but I got as far as Miami and then Castro and the boys marched into Havana and didn’t need me anymore. So there I was, and I started working in a hotel, moving furniture and just making a way of life, slowly. But that really was my introduction to race as a social reality, not just an idea. And I had this worldly sense of justice and idealistic view of what was possible in a democracy and there it was. It all kind of came together for me at eighteen. But then as my life unfolded, later, I ended up going to university in Chapel Hill in 1964, which was right as the Civil Rights Movement took off, so I got caught up in that from ’64 to ’68, and then in the ’70s lived in Jamaica for a couple years, and spent an awful lot of time traveling the Caribbean. One thing led to another, as it does if you live long enough and follow your nose … you learn from one experience and that creates the terms for the next. So it isn’t really a new thing for me. It’s something that was generated in my early 20s. I wasn’t really writing yet at this point. I hadn’t been published. I was just making my way, and trying to invent myself as a writer. But my preoccupation with race—and it isn’t really an obsession, just a preoccupation and a belief it’s probably the central American story, going back to the first time Europeans arrived on the shores here, and it’s pretty constant—it’s just gotten more interesting, more complex, and I’m starting to reach into Africa, as you see in the last book.

DL:I still don’t think—despite your books being made into movies and you obviously sell books and you’re very prolific—that you’ve really broken into the mainstream consciousness in the way that some other writers have?
RB:Well, probably not…

DL:I mean, you write a little dark…
RB:Well, dark is the nice way to put it. Grim is a way some people put it, too. But yeah, that’s probably true, because the books are hard reads and they make demands on the reader that most novels don’t. But on the other hand, I can’t complain in the slightest.

DL:OK, so if Hannah Musgrave is, in a way, you … but female…
RB:Well, in a sense, although not really. I never went as far politically as she did. I was an activist in the late ’60s, early ’70s, and helped establish the SDS chapter at my university.

DL:But of course, she was from a classic, nice Boston upbringing.
RB:An awful lot of those kids were, who went the whole route. I didn’t go the whole route. I was married and had children and wanted to be a writer, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice everything to go out there and go wild in the streets. And so when Weathermen was formed, that was where I sort of backed off. But the kids who continued to move to the left—most of them, in fact—were from privileged, affluent backgrounds and often from parents who were quite liberal, progressive and politically active, themselves. And Hannah, in that sense, is very typical of a lot of them, from Weathermen.

DL:She’s really intriguing because she’s so calm. She’s given the assignment to go kill this minor federal employee. And she might be able to rationalize it, maybe not, maybe she’d back off at the last minute, but she’d think about it…
RB:She’d certainly think about it. That’s one reason I think so much of the story goes back into her early life as a child, and the relationship her parents had—with each other and with her—and their use for her. In a way, she’s borderline narcissistic. And it’s very hard to write about a narcissist in a sympathetic way. There aren’t many of them in literature.

DL:That’s the thing I like about this book … I mean, you feel less sympathy for her than you feel for Wade in Affliction, yet somehow she’s more engaging and complex. Reading, you end up thinking, ‘what are you doing, where are you going? Why are you doing this?’ Because she sounds logical…
RB:She’s intelligent, educated, reflective and self-analytical, and I think she’s honest. Still these are all qualities of mind that are…

DL:But she just lacks this humanity…
RB:But she’s not deluded about that…

DL:No, until people are dead. And then she loves them, I think.
RB:Yeah, her father, her husband, her son … this is true. But she’s like a lot of people, especially people who have power and privilege. I don’t find her unfamiliar, let’s put it that way. Frankly, I spent four years of my life in her close proximity, so I had to find something about her that was really seductive and attractive. And I did. There were times I thought, ‘Shit, I’m falling in love with this woman.’ And that’s really trouble, you know? Because, if you fall in love with a woman like that, you’re really gonna get hurt. But I fell in love with Madame Bovary, too, and Anna Karenina. And some of the great women of literature are so complex and cold and scary that I don’t feel she’s in bad company in that regard. But it’s funny because now I’m starting to get interviewed for this book, and a lot of interviewers come to me asking how they should feel about her—should they admire her or condemn her? And I can’t answer that.

DL:Well, she’s more like one of the classical Greek heroes, and sort of deserving of both. So, of course you’re sad for her when her husband is killed … To me, this next part is a key moment that explains Hannah, and it was really interesting, because my youngest sister did something very similar, and it’s the moment when Hannah and her father are going someplace and they run over the family dog. And Hannah wants to be called Scout. So this is when it’s apparent she’s turned into this other person.
RB:She turns into Scout that day.

DL:I think this is where this character comes from through the whole story, and eventually comes full circle, and becomes a more human person. But I remember my sister, one day, in the mall. My sister was about 14 or 15, and I walk into the other end of the mall with my mom and I was 17 or 18 and I don’t have any trouble being seen places with my mom because I’m a boy, but girls have a little more trouble with this. And I saw my sister down at the other end of the mall and she was smoking a cigarette with a couple friends. And I know my mom knew she smoked, and she was just going to ignore it, but she just kind of stood there and acted like my mom didn’t exist. And my mom saw her and her reaction and said, “Well, OK.” And that was the moment she became her own ‘Scout.’
RB:Yeah, the withdrawal.

DL:The withdrawal, and then sort of…
RB:Shutting down.

DL:Yeah.
RB:That’s definitely how I saw Hannah—as having the capacity to shut down. And it started early. You’re right to point to that scene. That’s where she clearly shuts down and doesn’t allow herself to react emotionally. Her father’s just run over the dog and he’s coming apart and is feeling guilty and she just cools it. And chills him right out.

DL:It seems one of the recurring themes in your books, is that we’re abandoning and losing our children on a massive scale…
RB:Right.

DL: Were Liberia and Africa attractive because they’re doing it in an even more extreme way, with kids with guns…
RB: I wasn’t so conscious of that, but it’s certainly a horrific reality. But the theme of child abandonment has definitely come up again and again, and it’s something I think is deep in our culture, especially over the last half century—certainly in my lifetime. I’ve seen it occur on an anthropological level, and we’re not even aware of it, but the consequences are all around us.

DL: I think it’s the root of the violence in that country. I’m not a pro-gun person, but I think there’s a point when we have to accept it’s not just the guns…
RB: Exactly. Also, there’s a sense in which Liberia is the abandoned child of the U.S. On a metaphoric level, you can look at it that way, and on a behavioral level, too, you can see how this abandoned child is suicidally violent. And that’s how these kids are today, walking through the streets.

DL: Have you gone to Liberia?
RB: Yeah, I’ve been to West Africa a number of times, and tried to get in there last summer. I was in Sierra Leone, which was just recovering from its own ten-year civil war, and horrible brutality—very similar history, only it’s the abandoned child of England instead of the U.S. Anyhow, it erupted. That was when bodies started piling up in Monrovia and I decided the better part of valor was to go home at that point. But I went to Ghana, and I went up to Senegal—the whole West African horn, which I really love. It’s an absolutely fabulous, fascinating part of the world. Its history is so cruel and sad, and now everything’s coming home to roost, unfortunately—the horrible history of the last 150, 200 years.

DL: When Hannah finally goes back to Liberia, she visits her old house on September 10, 2001, which is an interesting choice. When my wife and I first got together, we went to Morocco and North Africa. [Her] mother was married to a state department employee who was actually with the CIA. I guess I can say CIA, because he’s dead now. But he was a CIA guy. I mean, he didn’t go around blowing things up, or carrying a black bag or trench coat. He was part Native American, and spoke all these languages and translated documents. But they were based in Somalia. Mogadishu. And my wife had been there, and even though it was a dangerous place, in the ’80s you could fly to Nairobi, get on Somali Air, which was a DC-3, and fly into Mogadishu, and her mom picked you up at the airport and you went to their house, which was in the diplomatic quarter, and they had a couple guards. And it was a scary place, she told me, and at times, when they’d shop at the market, the women would start chanting at her and her mother. She always wondered what they were saying, and her mom was like, “Oh, don’t worry, they just want us to buy things from them.” But it turns out they were actually chanting, “Whore!” So my wife’s experience—having been to Islamic countries—was, “We’re not gonna go there like hippy, punk-rocker types. I’m gonna wear a scarf on my head. I’m gonna cover my body from head to toe, my hands will be exposed, and I’ll wear a wedding ring, and you’re gonna wear a suit, and we’ll be treated so much better. And we were. We were treated very nicely, and welcomed into people’s homes. … But after 2001, that world is gone.
RB: You bet it is.

DL: And I can’t go there anymore—not North Africa, not the Middle East…
RB: Well, this is true. It’s different now. Well, it’s not so different in West Africa because it’s not Muslim. Actually, in January, I’m going to Nairobi and Tanzania and climbing Kilimanjaro. And I was just, not too long ago, in the West Bank, in the occupied Palestinian territories. So, I’ve done it, I’m doing it. But you’re right, it’s really different now, and you feel it. I have a level of anxiety about traveling now that I didn’t have before 2001, and before the Iraq war, which has made it even worse. I wish I was traveling on a Canadian passport sometimes. A whole lot of things are different, and that’s why the book is framed the way it is, with September 11 at the end. It’s implicit in the opening chapter that she leaves to return to Liberia that week in September. It’s because her story and her vision of terrorism has been forever changed after September 11, just as ours has.

DL: They were gonna rob some banks, blow up a bank, or something…
RB: Yeah. And that can’t be done now. The whole vocabulary of the ’60s and political action of the ’60s and ’70s has to be rethought and reexamined. And that’s partly what I was doing. It’s like a time capsule now. And her story, where she says at the end, ‘my story can never be told again, it won’t happen again.’ And it’s true, I don’t think you’ll ever see anything like the Weather Underground in this country again. At least not until the memory of this era has long passed.