Janette Turner Hospital
Author
of
Due Preparations for the Plague talks with Robert Birnbaum
Novelist and teacher Janette Turner Hospital was born in Queensland,
Australia and has lived in Canada, France and India. She previously
has published six novels (Oyster, The Last Magician, Charades,
Borderline, Tiger in the Pit, The Ivory Swing) and three story
collections (Isobars, Dislocations and Collected Stories).
She has won numerous awards, and her work has been translated into
twelve languages. Her new novel, Due Preparations for the Plague,
has already won the Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction–the
first of this year's big Australian literary awards. Janette Turner
Hospital is currently the Professor and Distinguished Writer in
Residence at the University of South Carolina.
The publisher of Due Preparations or the Plague refers
to it as an "elegant literary thriller," which as you
will read below is a description she eschews. The story follows
two people who don't know each other as they respond the aftermath
of the death of one of their parents—Lowell, his mother, and
Samantha, her father, in an airline hijacking. And then Lowell's
father, a long-time intelligence field operative, dies under mysterious
circumstances, and Lowell joins Samantha's obsessive search for
answers to the central explosive event of their lives. Within this
context, Hospital presents a haunting section that refers to Boccacio's
Decameron in a very original and poignant way—prompted
by her viewing a documentary on the WW II London Blitzkrieg and
the images of huddled, gas-mask-wearing people in underground shelters.
Robert Birnbaum: What caused your turn from being
a medievalist to writing fiction?
Janette Turner Hospital: A dearth of options.
I had multiple career disjunctions. I was a high school teacher
in Australia, and then I married, and my husband was awarded a fellowship
to do his doctorate at Harvard. So we came here [Cambridge] in '67.
My qualifications were not accepted to teach high school here. Every
time you move countries, your qualifications are not accepted, and
you have to start from scratch again. So I became a librarian at
Harvard and got half way through a library science degree at Simmons,
and then we moved again. Then I did my graduate work in medieval
literature when he was teaching.
RB: You moved to where?
JTH: Kingston, Ontario. One of Canada's top three universities,
Queen's is there—which is where I did my graduate work. Then
we went off to a village in Southern India, on sabbatical.
RB: Why India?
JTH: My husband's research.
RB: He was doing research in Sanskrit?
JTH: Sanskrit is a dead language except that it is spoken by the
temple pundits and Brahmins. So we had to acquire another language,
Malayalam. We were in the state of Kerala, a little strip down the
southwest coast.
RB: Near Goa?
JTH: Goa is on the Southwest coast, but it's not in the state of
Kerala, which is further south. Goa is its own little world.
RB: So people say.
JTH: Yeah, so my husband was doing research on the temple in Trivandrum
on the iconography of the temple. Which is fascinating but I'm sure
you don't want to digress into that.
RB: Perhaps another time.
JTH: Except that I have to say it's so interesting because they
have images on the side of the temple of Vishnu and Krishna and
Marx and Lenin. All up there, a pretty interesting combination.
The communists in Kerala go and make puja at the temple
when they want a good election outcome.
RB: What's puja?
JTH: It's an offering of gifts to the gods.
RB: Okay, so now you are in India…
Blind optimism is
what every writer has to have to keep going because the odds
are not good… |
JTH: I wrote a short story, tapped out on a little
portable manual typewriter that was subsequently stolen, and mailed
it back to the Atlantic and it was an Atlantic
First. So that got me started.
RB: What year was this?
JTH: I mailed it back in '77 and it was an Atlantic First
in March of '78.
RB: Want to venture a guess whether somebody could do that today?
JTH: The chances then were slim. The only thing I had going for
me was I was too innocent to know what the odds against it were.
I subsequently came to know Michael Curtis, who told me that they
received several hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts per week. I
just knew nothing about the literary world.
RB: Did you send your story anywhere else?
JTH: The year preceding that, when I was ostensibly writing my
Ph.D., I had begun writing short stories, and I knew no better than
to keep sending them to the Atlantic and the New Yorker.
RB: [laughs]
JTH: I didn't even have a Writer's Manual. I looked up
the fine print on their mastheads.
RB: So I guess we can say things have changed.
JTH: The odds against it were very high then. I think I was protected
by my innocence.
RB: Beautiful. Have you sustained it [innocence]?
JTH: [chuckles] Blind optimism is what every writer has to have
to keep going because the odds are not good —it's good to
have a working spouse with an income.
RB: To look at your biography, you were born in Australia, lived
in Canada and the US and another English-speaking country, India.
So big deal—it's all pretty much the same. But it isn't, is
it?
JTH: No, it's hugely different, and I always felt
that moving from Harvard Square in the '60s to Kingston, Ontario
was a bigger culture shock than moving from there to a village in
Southern India where you expected difference. In a way culture shock
has a more disorienting impact when you are not expecting a new
place to be different and when no else is expecting you to be having
adjustment problems. I thought I would go mad my first five years
in a little college town [In Canada].
RB: Up until recently Canada seemed to be just another part of
the US. People rarely look at English-speaking places as having
significantly different cultures.
 JTH:
Canada has always resented the fact that it is regarded that way.
When you move from country to country the biggest hassles are bureaucratic
ones. And getting your credentials recognized. Nobody recognizes
anybody else's.
RB: Yeah, I moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire….
JTH: Bureaucracy can drive you nuts anywhere.
RB: Bureaucracy is its own country.
JTH: Kafka wrote the novel on that topic for all time. The
Castle and The Trial, both of them.
RB: What adjustments did you have to make in moving to Columbia,
South Carolina?
JTH: Well, huge adjustments: but in another curious way, it feels
like a displaced homecoming to me. I joke in South Carolina that
I grew up in the state except it was in Australia. The state of
Queensland, which is my home in Australia, has many, many similarities
to South Carolina —climatic ones, a feudal political system.
The premier of Queensland for thirty years, Joh Bjelke Pterson,
is a carbon copy of Strom Thurmond. They governed their states as
though they were little feudal fiefdoms, and their administrations
were corrupt as hell, and all their buddies get all the perks. It's
still like that in South Carolina. It is beginning to change.
RB: Yeah, the patriarchs die [laughs]. Although in a feudal system
it may not matter.
JTH: No it doesn't because Strom's son is US Attorney, the state's
top federal prosecutor. He received the appointment when he was
only two years out of Law School, and he certainly did not distinguish
himself as a student. One of the SC's top political scientists was
quoted as saying that his appointment was the equivalent of having
a recent Medical School graduate perform open-heart surgery. Both
the state of Queensland and the state of South Carolina have a bad
history of race relations. But we didn't have a civil war in Queensland.
That has been the biggest and most fascinating thing. I knew zilch
about the Civil War before I went to the South. And all of the seven
years that I spent in Boston, maybe it came up in conversation twice.
Now I'd been told that it would seem, as the Civil War has not yet
ended. I thought that was exaggeration or poetic license. It really
is like that. You can’t go to a social event without it coming
up in discussion. It's an obsession. It's a cult. It's a mythic
rite. It's a whole ethos about the South. It’s weird, but
it's fascinating to me, and writers like to live in fascinating
places.
RB: What is in it for people to sustain this mythology?
JTH: This may seem like a non sequitur, but it's like Samantha
in Due Preparations for the Plague. If something has impinged
massively and tragically in your life, there are two ways of dealing
with it. One is Lowell's way within the novel: repression, and the
other is obsessive preoccupation with the event, which is Samantha's
way. Losing the War of Secession is clearly a big wound in the South's
psyche, to have lost that war and to have lost it on Southern soil.
It was Southern fields that were burned. That's something I have
come very aware of since I have been here in the South. 90% of the
people who fought in that war were not slave owners. They were poor
farmers who were scrabbling and living on the soil. From their point
of view the Northerners came down and burnt their crops and put
their families at risk.
RB: Why weren't they angry at the land-owning patricians?
JTH: Yeah, that's where I learned there was a mixture of truth
and an incredible degree of denial when the South says all the time
that the war was not about slavery. On one level, that's totally
ridiculous because it was precisely about extending the right to
own slaves to the new states. In another sense, for most of the
people who fought, it was not about slavery. It was about saving
their crops and their houses. So I've inevitably become interested
in the Civil War. But what I am interested in is its ongoing intense
psychological effects in the South. It was very interesting to be
in the South at 9/11. For most Americans it was the first time that
the psychic shield of American invulnerability was shaken. I kept
hearing on the talk shows that people felt personally unsafe. In
the South, that's the only part of America that never had that sense
of invulnerability. It’s always felt and still feels the underdog
threatened without the right of hitting back. It's only partially
accurate, but it’s a very strong feeling in the South. I don't
know how, but it is going to inform my writing. I never know how
things show up in my work, but sooner or later everything does.
RB: Will you be developing a drawl? [both laugh] Of course, there
is a seemingly never-ending question about Southern writing, part
of which claims that strong story-telling tradition, as if there
isn't such a thing elsewhere…
JTH: It is a stronger tradition in the South. Take the difference
between the North and the South in the matter of dinner parties,
for instance. Dinner parties in Boston were lively debate sessions
about politics and ideas. In the South, there is this Old World
manner/courtesy thing that people will not get into heated discussions.
They don't discuss politics at social events or dinner parties.
What they do is tell these family anecdotes. So storytelling, in
that old Dickensian 19th century way, is still a living social thing
in the South. These tales tend to get tall and elaborated.
RB: Is it possible also that it's a result of southerners staying
closer to home?
JTH: They do stay closer to home.
RB: Which suggests that they are more in contact with their families.
…I learned
there was a mixture of truth and an incredible degree of denial
when the South says all the time that the war was not about
slavery… |
JTH: They are very family oriented. If they move
they come back. An interesting example is Allan
Gurganus. Who is from North Carolina, gay and has every reason
to leave the South—he lived in NYC for many years. He is back
in North Carolina and is quite passionate about the South, though
he has New York liberal kind of views. He wrote this wonderful op-ed
piece (June 8, 2003) about the Atlanta bomber with this wonderful
sentence that so captures the paradox of the South, "Manners
are important in the South, even to our bombers."
RB: I thought that was a brilliant piece, and it was interesting
to compare the Eric Rudolph story to the Unabomber—earlier
this year I had read Alston
Chase's book on Ted Kuczinski. People apparently helped and
hid Rudolph.
JTH: It's still that Southern psyche. Protecting him from those
Federal Yankee Northerners, "We protect our own."
RB: Do you notice a difference between North and South Carolina?
JTH: I haven't been in North Carolina enough to form an opinion.
RB: Have you noticed that there are many writers in North Carolina
and not as many in South Carolina?
JTH: I have picked up the South Carolina view on this issue. Which
is that they are the aristocrats and the North Carolinians are the
plebes. They call them tarheels. Virginia and South Carolina are
the two aristocratic, southern states and they jockey for supremacy
between themselves. South Carolina is pretty miffed that Virginia
claims itself as the heart of the Confederacy when in fact South
Carolinians know that is in South Carolina.
RB: Hmm, Robert E Lee and the Lees?
JTH: He kidnapped the Confederacy. South Carolina was the first
state to secede, and the first shot of the Civil War was fired there
though of course Robert E. is much revered in South Carolina, as
everywhere in the south.
RB: What about the writers? I know of two South Carolina writers.
Dorothy
Allison… And Percival
Everett, though I don't think he is interested in claiming his
South Carolinian heritage.
JTH: There are many other fine South Carolinian writers: Josephine
Humphries, Ron Rash, Carrie Allen McCray, Rosa Shand, Cynthia Boiter,
Sue Monk Kidd, and Pat Conroy, among others. But Percival Everett
is brilliant. Quite Swiftian, I think. A savage but brilliantly
intellectual, satirical mind.
RB: Which seems to be amplified coming from someone so mild-mannered
and unassuming.
JTH: He reminds me of a couple of other people that I have gotten
to know well and admire hugely —other African-Americans born
and bred and still in South Carolina. One is Judge Matthew Perry,
who is a US District Court Judge. He was the lawyer for the student
who integrated USC. He himself came back as a decorated war hero
from Korea but was not allowed to study law at USC. That is how
recent desegregation was. It's really a shock. USC was not integrated
until until 1963. I asked Matthew Perry once—he had told stories
about coming back from Korea and the black soldiers were not allowed
to eat in the same place as the white soldiers from South Carolina—"What
did you do about the anger? You must have been mad as hell not to
be allowed to these things?" He said, "I had a very good
mentor in Thurgood Marshall, who always said to all the young lawyers,
'Lose your head, lose the case.' You couldn't afford anger as a
strategy." Cleveland Sellars is another example. He is now
head of African-American Studies at USC. He has published an autobiography:
The River of No Return. He was one of the founders of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was student leader
of a peaceful protest that came to be known in South Carolina as
the Orangeburg Massacre. State troopers shot and killed three of
the students and Cleveland was shot in the back of the leg and spent
a year in jail as a felon, charged with conspiracy to commit violence.
He subsequently got a Ph.D. at Harvard in education, but could not
teach in South Carolina because of his "criminal record."
It wasn't until Rhett Jackson, founder of the Happy Bookseller (a
superb independent bookstore), who was on the parole board, made
a huge and successful effort to get a pardon for Cleveland, that
he was able to be hired by USC. I asked Cleveland that same question,
"How did you deal with anger?" His answer was: "I
knew that the anger would destroy me. That it would corrode me.
So I never wanted to find out which policemen had shot me because
I knew I would become obsessive about it. I didn't want that. I
wanted my energy for other things."
RB: I've heard similar stories about victims of oppression in Nicaragua
and Argentina….
JTH: It's an awareness that anger is going to destroy them, not
that they don't have the right to feel it. I don't know if I could
do that. It's an incredibly mature place to be able to get to. You
can assent to that intellectually, but it's not so easy to make
anger disappear.
RB: Well, okay. So you've written another book?
JTH: [laughs] Are we going to discuss it?
RB: Sure. I saw your novel Due Preparations for the Plague
referred to as a thriller.
JTH: That's a publisher's marketing term. The only reason it's
being called a thriller is because of the horrific accident of its
topicality due to 9/11. That it happens to be about something that
is a gut issue for us. Of course, I had no way of knowing that was
going to happen when I was writing the book.
RB: You have compared terrorism to the Plague?
 JTH:
It seems to me a very apt metaphor. As was the case with the Black
Death, one cannot ultimately protect oneself from attack. No matter
what precautions you take, extra airport security, extra visa requirements
for people, not letting travelers leave transit lounges, ultimately
there is not any way to protect yourself. A determined terrorist
or suicide bomber will get around all those things. As with the
plague, too, for different reasons. In medieval times people didn't
know what caused the plague or how to protect themselves.
RB: Well, there was The Devil.
JTH: Right, that's another interesting parallel in both cases there
is an overwhelming need to find a cause because that would give
you a sense of control. The two causes that came up most frequently
in the Middle Ages and again in the 18th century with fresh outbreaks
were either it was God or the Devil. Or God punishing people for
sinful lives. If everyone would just get his or her lives right
with God again then the plague would vanish. The other cause was
the Jews poisoning the wells. So a few Jewish pogroms would make
people feel they were getting a handle on the plague. The fact that
there was not the slightest evidence that a pogrom against the Jews
lessened the spread of the plague didn't matter. Blaming the Jews
made people feel safer. There are inescapable parallels with the
current administration linking Iraq to 9/11. There's been no evidence
of that, but blaming Iraq made people feel safer, made them feel
as though something was being done to control terrorism.
RB: Do you think many people worry about being attacked now? Is
that 'top of mind', that inelegant marketing phrase?
JTH: Right after Sept 11 a lot of people worried daily for a time
and then we went back into our normal state of denial which means
that terrorism happens to other people, not to us. It does affect
people who are flying. It sure would affect me if I lived in Jerusalem
or Tel Aviv.
RB: Suicide bombing is a plague.
JTH: Yeah and in the same way there is no way to protect yourself
from it. Which is how the plague felt to medieval Europe. But it's
true that on the whole we can't live functioning lives without living
in massive states of denial. It's same with cars. The statistics
for car deaths are pretty big, but we all get into our cars everyday
and believe that accidents happen to other people, not to us. And
unless we have that state of magic denial we couldn't function.
RB: You certainly carry off the thriller part of this story, but
there is more to the novel.
JTH: I'm not sure that it's an asset to have the marketing people
describe it that way. People who are looking for thrillers have
a very formulaic pattern like thing they are looking for—and
my novel is going to annoy them because it has all sorts of things
that they are going to find extraneous to the thriller. There is
a niche category that John Le Carre has made his own which publishers
and reviewers now tend toward calling and people tend to be thinking
of now as the literary thriller category. I certainly love Le Carre's
work and would consider it an honor to be lumped in with him, but
I think of him simply as a fine literary writer whose topic happens
to be what he knows about because he was a spy. And similarly this
book is an accidental thriller— in that what I am interested
in is the inner lives of people long after disaster has hit them.
And also—I didn't start out planning to do this in the novel—
trying to imagine the inner life of someone who was an intelligence
agent.
RB: That's scary, isn't it? Talk about a hall of mirrors.
JTH: It's only a thriller because it is about these topical things.
And yes it is scary…the more I thought about it and tried
to imagine this character, the more I though what a dreadful life
this must be.
RB: Why choose such a life?
JTH: People enter that world because they are highly trained and
highly intelligent and go in out of idealism—we have a way
of life and a system of government that needs to be preserved. And
someone has to be in intelligence work to know who is planning to
attack it. So you go in with idealism, but it is the nature of the
task that it requires all kinds of decisions of short-term expediency,
which can get very murky. Also the great paradox at the heart of
all intelligence services—I never thought about it until this
novel—I went back and I read about Napoleon's secret service.
I realized that the paradox at the heart of all secret services
is that the better you train an agent, the less he is going to trust
anybody including his colleagues. That's exactly what is happening
now. The FBI doesn't trust the CIA doesn't trust the NSA. Information
is not shared because nobody trusts anyone else. So intelligence
agencies are programmed to self-destruct. I don't know any way around
that paradox. It must be hell to be in that world. It must make
havoc of the private lives.
RB: I thought you might mention the compromise on values of decency
and honor versus expediency…intelligence work ends up—if
it all resembles the fictional portrayals— you end murdering
and lying and cheating…
JTH: Initially in the early stages of creating Salamander, the
character in this novel, I thought that intelligence agents must
be very cold blooded. They must be able to disassociate themselves
from the consequences of their actions. But it isn't possible for
a novelist (for me) to create a character like that—not if
you try to get inside them. The ones that are cold blooded like
Sirocco. I couldn't get inside…
RB: You said 'sirocco'? [a brief discussion of the pronunciation
ensues]
The fact that there
was not the slightest evidence that a pogrom against the Jews
lessened the spread of the plague didn't matter. Blaming the
Jews made people feel safer. There are inescapable parallels
with the current administration linking Iraq to 9/11. |
JTH: Because I could not fathom, it is a great
enigma to me—evil. I can't do those characters from the inside.
So they do remain distant. When I try to really imagine Salamander
I imagine him as increasingly tortured and anguished and unraveling,
falling apart at the seams, going mad.
RB: When we talked about the Southerner sense of vulnerability
and the American attitude of invincibility I thought of Gil Scott
Heron's song "Military
and The Monetary" [and his poem entitled Work for Peace]
where he says, “Peace is not the absence of war, it is the
absence of the rules of war….” After Sept 11, 2001 people
claimed to feel vulnerable and I thought, "Are they kidding?
That's wrong (or wrong if they thought about it)." I don't
remember a time in my lifetime that there wasn't conflict in the
world and that given the so-called objective realities, was not
threatening to America and this notion of peace. There seems to
be this amnesia about the Cold war and fall out shelters and training
school kids to "Duck and cover" and the Cuban Missile
Crisis…
JTH: But they didn't happen. And disaster hadn't happened on to
American soil before 9/11. If you grew up in Europe—this is
one of the things I felt having lived in India where people are
dying in the streets all the time, most of the world throughout
history and even in the present has never had that sense of invulnerability
that the Americans have had—and only non-Southern Americans.
But most people throughout human history have not had that sense
of safety.
RB: We can agree that it's a sensibility whether or not it has
any basis in fact. I would say it is an act of denial. Sure, Chicago
has never been attacked. But when I grew up in Chicago in the Cold
War years and I remember the air read drills and the propaganda—my
sense of it was that it scared people…
JTH: Wouldn't you have experienced that anxiety
because of your family history?
RB: Well, sure. That also explains my left leanings and my identification
with threatened and marginalized peoples. But must one have direct
and original experience to have insights into past and present history?
JTH: That shouldn't be so. But it is simply my observation that
the average American life—even the Iraq war, hasn't affected
most people closely unless you are obsessively glued to TV or you
had a son [or daughter] over there. Most people can ignore that
it's going on. The sad truth is that people's capacity for empathy
or for really seeing the full implications is minimal. Unless they've
had personal experience….
RB: 'People' meaning Americans? Is that true of Australians and
Canadians?
JTH: It's true for everyone. I would say that the talent for self-protection
and indifference is universal. But America has been more insulated
from direct experience with the effects of war than most nations.
In Australia, World War II came a lot closer. Darwin was bombed,
and submarines were in Sydney harbor, and the Japanese were in New
Guinea. And most kids I went to school with had a father or an uncle
who'd been a prisoner of the Japanese—it felt close to Australian
shores and an invasion was planned and if the war hadn't ended when
it did things could have gone badly for Australia.
RB: How about engagement with the realities of the rest of the
world. Is it your sense that Australians are as disengaged from
world issues as Americans seems to be?
JTH: Yeah, most.
RB: Canadians also?
JTH: Canadian always believed… they are the major peacekeeping
force for the UN. They never had a revolution. They believe things
can be done without violence and there is very little violence in
Canadian history. Australians on the whole are laid back and disengaged
although their equivalent of the World Trade Center was the Bali
bombing. And that shook Australians badly, because Australians go
to Bali for vacation the way Americans go to Florida or the Caribbean.
But on the whole, yeah. The most common expression in Australia
is either, "She'll be right mate” or "No worries,
mate."
RB: Not quite "Whatever." Your intent in Due Preparations
was to put a microscope on a society under perennial stress?
JTH: No that wasn't my intent. It was to do a modern Decameron.
I was interested in what would happen if a group of people for whom
all the signifiers of race and gender were elided —how would
they interact with each other—my initial conception was that
the novel was going to be just that. The captive scene, that's the
Decameron section.
RB: That was horrific.
JTH: I tried to show how people would make wildly erroneous judgments
about other people based on who they thought they were. I just couldn't
figure out how to do it successfully without tying myself and the
reader in knots.
RB: So the novel expanded outward from that.
JTH: I hadn't begun writing it yet before the initial intention
began to change. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. The kernel
of the thought was that. I didn't have any intentions other than
wanting to explore how the obliteration of individual identity (from
the wearing of gas masks would affect the way people interacted).
When I had to think of the practicalities of why they might all
be wearing gas masks — that's where the idea of a hijacked
plane came up— then I started exploring these other lines
of thought. That led me into researching terrorism and espionage.
A novel grows so mysteriously and sometimes it is hard for me to
retrace the steps and detours and how it all came about. When I
really discovered what it was going to be about I guess the main
themes were how people negotiate massive trauma. That's something
I have always been interested in all my work. And I found myself
exploring the two extremes of the methods of coping: obsessive preoccupation
(which is Samantha's way) and complete denial (which is Lowell's
way) and various stages in between. And somewhere along the way,
I found that I became fascinated by a topic that initially I had
no interest in at all—why intelligence agencies always seem
to sabotage themselves because of this central paradox of the need
to trust no one.
RB: If the operatives are good they can't trust each other, trust
anyone.
JTH: Right. According to historians I read, that's what finally
did Napoleon in. He had the most highly trained secret service in
the world up to that point. People would not convey the knowledge
to him that would have saved him. That issue slowly evolved as an
interest on the way. The other thing was—this did come post
Sept 11, in the final section of the book— what would happen
in this society if a massive cover-up were revealed? And this I
am writing against the backdrop of Enron, Haliburton and all the
stuff that has come out about the FBI and the CIA post 9/11 and
it seemed to me that some spin doctor would construe the whole thing
as a hoax.
RB: Disregarding what the starting point was and the pathway, how
do you gauge whether you satisfied your intentions?
JTH: That happens in the writing. I just wouldn't finish it if
there weren’t some inner click. I didn't know this is what
I was writing about but I've got it. And, in fact, I did come to
a standstill a couple of times before the work came to a complete
standstill for a month after Sept 11. Yeah, it turned out to be
what it's about and this is the best way I could do it up to that
point. I never feel very happy afterwards with my novels, if I look
at them again.
RB: Do you?
JTH: I don't reread them, no. Sometimes when I am asked to do reading
and I go back, I think, “Oh no that wasn't right.” That's
what lures you in to the next book. You might get it right.
RB: How bad a feeling is that? [laughs]
JTH: It's like a pleasant addiction.
RB: I'm not asking about what moves you to write the next book.
I'm asking about the…
JTH: It's a very unpleasant feeling.
RB: You don't let yourself off the hook at all, "Saying you
did the best you could do at the time."
JTH: Intellectually I can assent to that. But when you look at
sections again and you wish you could edit them or do them over,
you think, "Oh My God! It's out there forever." That's
hubris for you.
RB: As a medievalist you assume it's going to be out there forever.
JTH: I really don't assume that. I know books don't have a very
long life span. On the other hand, it only takes one copy of a book
to survive… like the Library at Alexandria, once they're out
there in people's minds and on the record. And you think, "If
only I could recall it, fine tune it…"
RB: How much editing advice do you take?
JTH: It depends on the editor. I have actually been blessed always
with editors who are both tough and very smart and very in tune
with the writing. My first four books the editor was someone who
grew up in New York but who had moved to Toronto, Ellen Seligman.
And she was very, very good and would be tough, and if I got my
back up and said huffily, "You haven't understood what I am
doing" —the usual defense mechanism of writers. She would
say, "That's fine it's your book. If I have this reaction probably
some reviewers will. But if you are quite clear in your mind that
this is what you want to do and that won't bother you." Then
I would go and think about it a couple more days….
RB: [laughs] Would a male editor have handled you that way?
JTH: Have put it in that diplomatic way? Probably not. The editing
process is very valuable. And an author ignores it at his or her
peril. It's the first cold pair of eyes reading your manuscript.
By the time you are finished you have been living with the damn
thing for so long that you are married to it. You can't tell any
longer. Your reading of what is on the page is contaminated by all
your prior thinking and prior drafts. It's good to be challenged
and told, "Okay, that was your intention but that is not what
I am getting here." I resisted something on this one and I
was right to resist though I was nervous. Right from the start I
have had dual or triple editing and it taught me to be a wonderful
diplomat.
RB: Meaning being edited in Australia and the US?
 JTH:
Simultaneously in several countries and sometimes the different
editors disagree also and you are treading on eggshells trying negotiate
to get one final version. Christopher Potter, a brilliant British
editor, and Jill [Bialosky at WW Norton] both were pressuring me
to not have ten hostages. They didn't want the ones that the reader
didn't already know as characters in the book. I said, "Look,
this is a Decameron. Right from the start in my mind, the
very moment of the conception of this novel, there were going to
be ten people wearing gas masks. If I change that it's not my book
anymore." My editors were afraid that it was too many talking
heads. So I did shave it down—some of those monologues were
originally longer. But I wouldn't yield on that point. The Decameron
section was difficult to write. It is so much easier to write anguished
frenzy than it is to write this radiant calm. I was really petrified
that the hostage section would be seen as sentimental or as sugarcoating
the horror. That was my main fear because that would be anathema
to any literary novelist, and this was the section that I was writing
when 9/11 happened. 9/11 changed the tone of the bunker scene. I
recast the scene from one of anguish to one of almost ethereal calm
because I felt I had to honor the tone of those final cell-phone
calls from the top floors of the Twin Towers and from the doomed
planes. The transcripts of those calls amazed me and moved me profoundly.
RB: It never occurred to me that there were various English-language
versions. It's not acceptable to have an Australian edition and
an American edition?
JTH: Well, it’s complicated. It's preferable to try to get
one final version. They usually do make little changes. Anyway,
I was apprehensive about the Decameron section. The reviewers
seem to be agreeing with me.
RB: I have seen you quoted as saying your favorite authors are
pre-Enlightenment. Are there contemporary writers that you like
nearly as much?
JTH: Oh heck yes. Let's start with two dead American authors. Henry
James and Faulkner, I adore. And of living ones, I think Joyce Carol
Oates is amazing.
RB: She has been accused of writing too much.
JTH: I've accused her. It's so damn intimidating. But she's brilliant.
I think Percival Everett is fantastic. I just read Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett, which I thought, was great.
RB: Are you obliged to read a lot of contemporary writing?
JTH: That's funny way to put it. I want to.
RB: There are people who are put off by contemporary American fiction,
complaining that it is too writing school, writing for other writers.
JTH: Well, a lot of it is rather tedious and self-indulgent. But
there is also some very exciting contemporary writing going on.
I do always make my graduate students read non-American fiction.
Because I do think the confines of current American fiction are
really narrow. I have them read Kenzbro Oe, Alessandro Barricco,
the Italian, and also French novelists. Just really to say, the
novel is anything that novelists have made it. And this is something
I reproach my graduate students with—students in France, even
undergraduate students are far more familiar with contemporary American
literature and with other European literatures than American students
are with anything outside America. It's a consequence of being so
huge as a culture and dominating publishing.
RB: Well that's a generous interpretation. There is also xenophobia.
The other side of the invincibility.
JTH: It's a shame. Americans are short-changing themselves.
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Posted:
November 11, 2003
