Timehost: Hello everyone... Welcome to the Time room tonight. We're
very lucky to have with us tonight novelist Russell Banks. His newest book,
Cloudsplitter, is just out.
Timehost: It's about the Civil War era figure John Brown...a novel
told from the point view of his son, Owen. Mr. Banks is also the author of
the book "The Sweet Hereafter," and the novel "Affliction" as well as many
other books. Welcome.
Russell Banks: Welcome as well for me.
Timehost: Let me ask the first question here... I know I just said
the book was about John Brown... but in many ways it's not really. How would
you describe it?
Russell Banks: Well, it's the story of a family told from the point of
view of the faithful son, of a father, whose power of personality and
principles control both the family and the son -- and leads the family and
most particularly the son from idealism to extreme activism to guerrilla
warfare to terrorism and to martyrdom. It is, of course, about the
abolitionist movement as well. And I suppose, on a deeper level, perhaps a religious level,
it's the story of Abraham and Isaac, from Isaac's point of view. It's
also the story of the ongoing racial conflict in America -- told from the
point of view of one position exactly where the terms of that war and that
conflict were most clearly defined, the years just preceding the Civil War.
Timehost: Let's take a question from online.
PurplePiper asks: When did you first become involved with writing?
Russell Banks: I began as a boy with artistic talent...as a visual
artist ... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted
into reading serious literature. And out of a desire essentially to imitate
what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey. By the time I was
in my early twenties I had abandoned painting and drawing and had become a
beginning poet and fiction writer. Although I still occasionally paint and
draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing. But really, it was reading
that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics
like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary
people can be made into high art.
Francois_m asks: What did you think of the movie version of The Sweet
Hereafter?
Russell Banks: It pleased me immensely. In several ways... first because,
as a fan of the films of Atom Egoyan, I think that The Sweet Hereafter is his
best film, but most personally, as the author of the novel, I think that the
film is faithful to the novel's vision of the world, which is to say, my
vision of the world. He managed to translate the moral center of the novel
in such a way as to make it the moral center of the film. This is the rarest
of accomplishments in adaptation. I think that the director is one of the
most imaginative and intelligent directors working today. And I feel
privileged to have had my novel adapted by him. Naturally, in the adaptation
process, the backstory and background and a certain aspect of character get
lost, or abandoned. After all, a novel takes a day, two days or three to
read and a film happens in less than two hours. But given the constrictions
of time and what I regard as the limitations of cinema he did an
extraordinary job.
Timehost: a follow-up...
Francois_m asks: Would you like to work with Atom again?
Russell Banks: Actually, we've discussed the possibility. But we're both
superstitious about trying to repeat an adaptation, so what we're
contemplating now is the possibility of collaborating on an original
screenplay.
Timehost: One of the things that struck me in both "The Sweet
Hereafter" and "Cloudsplitter" is that your characters seem to be more
interested in speaking to people who have died than in speaking to the living. Their interests and
emotions seem more bound up with those who have passed away. Is that something you are
consciously aware of?
Russell Banks: Not until this very moment. That's a very original and
intelligent observation. I wonder if this is a reflection of my age, 57. And
the fact that my parents have reached an age where they stand on the
horizon. And the horizon seems not too far away from me.
Timehost: Actually, characters in each of the books proclaim that
they have died already, even though they are actually living...it's an idea
they seem obsessed with...are you saying that you are obsessed with that
idea?
Russell Banks: I'm not obsessed with it. But it seems to me at my age
that the dead are very much with us and we with them. In our personal lives
and in our connection to the past, via literature and history, I'm speaking
of course for myself, and my characters will naturally reflect that.
VIDEO_GAME_MASTER asks: is it hard being a writer
Russell Banks: Hard in what sense? Economically, yes, certainly. For
almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able
to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by
the average dentist or accountant. On the other hand, it is the only work
that makes me happy, and makes my life coherent. So it's been a trade-off
until relatively recently, when now I can earn a living comparable to that of
the average dentist or accountant. It's hard to spend years at a time
working in total solitude with no reality-check. When you might indeed be
mad and not know it. And of course, it's hard to produce a work at the end
of those years of solitude, which may or may not be understood or
appreciated. This is not to complain. Because as I said, there is no other
work that gives me as much pleasure and there is no other work that gives
my life such coherence. Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An
essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace
wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for.
kenguest_5b911499 asks: I've read and loved many of your novels...why
the subject of John Brown?
Russell Banks: John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I
was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war
movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university. He was an emblem then
of the left. He was also attached to the literary figures that meant the most
to me then and continue to mean a lot to me. The New England
transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. So he was a man of action
whose actions and principles engaged the men of mind and he was a figure
whose life seemed emblematic of the work that I was doing at that time. The
60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate
New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my
house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house
was still standing. So in a real sense, he became physically present to me
even if only as a ghost. By this time, he had become an emblem of the
radical right, the malicious, the radical anti-abortionists and other kinds
of homegrown terrorists. It seemed therefore that he was a figure for all
time, in the United States at least. It also seemed to me very quickly that
he stood upon that spot in American culture where the fractures of race and
violence and religion all cross. And these are themes that I have explored
and tried to dramatize in my work throughout my life. So it was as if I had
been given a gift by moving to upstate New York and finding the grave of John
Brown just down the road.
OwenBrown asks: You are my favorite author. I've read every bit
you've ever published. I am amazed at how clearly you can set a scene.
Your novels touch me deeply, probably because I grew up in similar hard
small towns. How do you face the computer every day? Is ...
Russell Banks: I'm not sure what you mean by your question. If you mean
having come from a background of deprivation, and having been raised feeling
marginalized, how do I entitle myself to be a literary writer, then my
answer is that it has been earned slowly over time and that I have depended
heavily on the validation and encouragement of others. If you mean, simply,
after such depression how do I get up in the morning and go to work every
day, then I can say that the work I do is ultimately so clarifying for me
and provides me with such a sense of purpose that it puts my depression
behind me.
kenguest_5b911499 asks: I missed the beginning of the chat...is it
true that there is a film of Affliction coming out soon?
Russell Banks: Yes. The film has been made by Paul Schrader starring
Nick Nolte as Wade Whitehouse and Willem Dafoe as his brother Rolfe. James
Coburn as the father and Sissy Spacek as Margie, Wade's girlfriend. It's a
beautiful film and just as brutal as the book. And it is expected to be
released in the fall. It made a very big splash at the Telluride and
Sundance film festivals. And, in my mind, is a remarkably good and powerful
adaptation of the book. Thanks especially to Nick Nolte's and James Coburn's
performances.
OwenBrown asks: How much were you involved in the making of the film,
The Sweet Hereafter? Did they just buy the novel and run with it or did you
collaborate during filming? It's a helluva movie.
Russell Banks: It was a fairly close collaboration. Atom visited me often
and sent me every draft of the screenplay and I felt as though he had
invited me to look over his shoulder, comment and advise at every step of
the way. He invited me into the editing room, onto the locations and even
gave me a cameo role. I felt it was a unique and even intimate
collaboration, although there was no contractual obligation between us to do
that. So that when the film was completed, I had in my own mind as great a
stake in its worth as he did. Although, of course, ultimately, it is his
film and if anything, I am only its godfather.
Doctor_Illuminatus asks: have any outside influences affected you
i.e. hemingway, faulkner, burroughs?
Russell Banks: The list of influences is long and constantly changing. I
think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers
such as Hawthorne and Melville-- the American classics. Amongst the
modernists, particularly, the American modernists, I would say Faulkner
influenced me much more than Hemingway or anyone else. But then in my 40s
and the 1980s, I became more influenced by the naturalists such as Dreiser,
Sherwood Anderson, and following them, writers such as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.
MichiganWoody asks: I've heard that some authors choose stories by
trying to ignore a story idea until they simply cannot put off writing the
story any longer. Do you use a method like this to cultivate story ideas?
Russell Banks: No. But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out
stories or hunt them down. So far I've been very lucky in that stories have
come to me like a thunderstorm , unexpected, full of darkness and energy
demanding all my attention.
Secretscoop asks: Do you think the movie version of The Sweet
Hereafter relied too heavily on the Pied Piper thread to foist the themes on
the audience?
Russell Banks: Your question suggests that you think so. I myself don't.
I agree it's not very subtle. On the other hand, neither is film. It was a
decision made jointly by Atom and I to include it, to try and lift the story
out of the everyday reality of a particular community and make it more of a
folk tale, or fairy tale.
Francois_m asks: Can you see Cloudsplitter being turned into a film?
Russell Banks: I'm still too close to it to imagine it as a film. The
voice of Owen Brown is still in my ears. I recently wrote the screenplay of
Continental Drift for the director Agnieszka Holland. Now, that's 13 years after
publishing the book, and I learned that those 13 years were necessary for
me to detach enough from the book so that I could approach it as a
screenwriter. I think I learned from that that one should not adapt one's
own novel until enough time has passed that one is able to imagine the novel
as having been written by a stranger. At this point, I cannot think of
Cloudsplitter in that way.
Timehost: Speaking of the voice of Owen Brown, how did you choose him
to be the narrator of the story?
Russell Banks: It came to me by accident. While I was researching the
novel, I followed a footnote from a biography by Richard Boyers to the Rare
Book Room at Columbia University where there were seven boxes of dusty
research materials gathered early in the century for a biography of Brown by
a man named Oswald Villard. Among those materials were interviews done in
1905 and 1906 of the last surviving children of John Brown, who were, of
course, elderly. They were done by a woman named Katherine Mayo. This immediately
struck me as the best way to tell the story. -- from the point of view of an
elderly child of Brown, grown to old age, looking back. As it happened,
there was a perfect witness to Brown, his son, Owen. Born in 1824, he was an
adult and close to his father at all the crucial moments in his life.
Better, he escaped from Harper's Ferry, disappeared through the
abolitionists' underground and reappeared as a hermit-shepherd on a
mountaintop in California, and never gave interviews, never told his story.
The novel is his story. He was the witness who lived to tell what happened
and never told what happened. The perfect narrator for a novelist.
Timehost: There are so many vivid and lurid details about what Owen
does--I don't want to give them away, but I do want to ask how much of what
you write about him is rooted in research and how much is your imagination?
Russell Banks: It's difficult to give you a percentage breakdown, but
what's historically known, what is the case, has been honored in the book.
Where it's not known who said what or who did what, I have invented. I have
done some rearranging of events and character, having invented out of
whole cloth certain characters and events. My major allegiance has been to
storytelling, not to history. However, this is not a fantasy. It is a story
based on history, perhaps in somewhat the same way Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter is based on history of 150 years earlier than the time in
which it was written. We don't read the Scarlet Letter in order to
understand the 1690s of New England. We read it in order to understand the
human soul, as Hawthorne in 1849 understood it. That sort of intention was
my intention in writing Cloudsplitter.
Timehost: For example, you write at length about his sexual
turmoil...his crimes...and you even seem to suggest that he was really the strongest supporter
in the Brown family of violence as a way of ending slavery.
Russell Banks: For example, the question of Owen Brown's sexuality, which
is somewhat ambiguous, there is no historical evidence one way or the other
in regard to that, but it seemed to me to be psychologically essential to
the story and his relation to his father. Or the question of his violence,
which at times, supersedes and exceeds his father's violence. That too,
seemed to me to belong to the psychology of the son and his relationship
with his father, though there is no historical material to describe that or
to hint at that one way or the other. At those moments, history becomes a
novel. A novelist writes about what could have been, not what should have
been, and not what was.
Secretscoop asks: Do you have any thoughts on the "workshop fiction"
syndrome and the proliferation of graduate writing programs?
Russell Banks: Graduate writing programs are essentially a rationalized
form of a writer's apprenticeship and so far in a controlled environment, a
young writer is given the essential elements required by an apprenticeship -
a peer group, a mentor, and a few years outside the economy. That is their
essential value and the difference between one workshop and the other
basically depends upon the difference between the quality of the peer group
and the fellowship program . They're neither good or bad in and of
themselves. I think that their effect upon fiction writing has been grossly
exaggerated. They have neither helped nor hurt writing over the last 25
years.
jackleguest_27bc13202 asks: How do you develop characters? What's YOUR
process?
Russell Banks: I think the key for me is not to learn how to be a
character or embody a character, but rather to learn how to listen a
character or to observe a character. The most difficult aspect for me in
writing fiction is to imagine myself fully as a listener and watcher. I
don't try to speak for people or to imitate them. I try to listen and to
watch. So I guess that I'm describing a process whereby I induce in myself
auditory and visual hallucination. I don't have a mechanical way of going
about this. It is simply the way I engage the people I'm trying to write
about.
rogerguest_eb912670 asks: On what basis did you describe John Brown's
singing voice?!
Russell Banks: I guessed. It seemed to me that that would have to be the
kind of voice he would have to have on the basis of his speaking voice.
Which I did read was described as rather thin and high.
Xfgirl asks: do you have a favorite setting or time at which you
prefer to write?
Russell Banks: Yes. Both. I prefer to write in a studio that I have made
out of a cabin that was used to boil maple sap down into maple syrup,
called, in my part of the country, a sugar shack. And I work primarily from
8am until midday, when I seem to grow slightly stupid. I'm perhaps more
alert and have easier access to my unconscious than I do later when I become
anxious about the day-to-day business of day-to-day life.
Francois_m asks: how did u get the idea for The Sweet Hereafter?
Russell Banks: Basically from a newspaper clipping describing the
aftermath of a school bus accident in a Mexican-American small town in the
south of Texas, in the late 80s. It was not so much the accident itself as
the report in the newspaper of the effects on the families of the tragedy
and of the lawsuits that many of the families pursued. It tore the community
apart. It was that that I decided was worth a novel.
OwenBrown asks: What's next for you? What are you currently working
on?
Russell Banks: That's a good question to close with. After completing
Cloudsplitter, I realized I had been working pretty hard for more than a
decade and had not had a break from fiction. I needed the well to refill.
And so I decided to take a year off. As it happened, the films of two of my
books were being made and released, so I could be easily distracted by that.
This fall, I wrote the text for a book of photographs, and I'm now working on
the libretto of an opera. Relative to a long novel, these are small
projects, the kind of projects whose end I can see when I begin. When I
finish these, I will probably begin another novel, one that I think will be
set in the Liberian civil war of the early 90's.
Timehost: Any closing thoughts? Are you off to the Academy Awards?
Russell Banks: Yes. Happily or maybe not so happily, the Academy Awards
coincide with my book tour that brings me to Los Angeles in late March, so I
will arrive there and attend the awards ceremony and, at the same time, do
the interviews and readings associated with the publication of
Cloudsplitter. This in Hollywood, is what they call synergy. However, in my
life it's what I call a happy coincidence.
Timehost: I might call that a little exhausting! But it sounds like
fun...congratulations, and thanks for joining us this evening. We've enjoyed
having you with us.
Russell Banks: Thank you for having me. I've enjoyed it as well.
