“The novel is one that combines thoughts, meditations, insights, yet is deeply grounded in the daily reality of the hero . . . ”
—richard ford
In the 1980s and ’90s, American literature held a prominent place within France’s literary panorama. Its readers were drawn to this new crop of fiction that appeared in bookstore window displays and talked about “the things that count, the things that move us,” in the words of Raymond Carver,1 the author who, alongside Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, and Russell Banks, was among the four most popular American writers of the time. Yet they couldn’t have been more different from one another, in subject matter or style. So what exactly made their work so attractive to the French public?
Long accustomed to scenes of tamed nature and marked-off farmlands, these readers were now being exposed to America’s wilderness and grandiose landscapes. They came to associate three authors—Harrison, Carver, and Ford—with the Great American West and, in fact, identified them as “Montana writers.”
It is true that, fleeing the rush and demands of big cities, a number of authors had moved to the largest and least populated of the Western states, seeking silence and spiritual renewal through the breathtaking mountains, glaciers, deep forests, rivers, and immense ranchlands. They hailed from elsewhere, but had managed to turn Montana into a grandiose symbol for their fans abroad.
There was another element that captured the interest of the French. As large-scale, mechanized agriculture was reorganizing their own farmlands, and their cities were growing into sprawling metropolises, in these novels they discovered a close contact with real people, be they laborers, woodcutters, ranchers, or blue-collar workers, who were grappling with the realities of survival. Grown weary of a literature focused on the self and experimental stylistics, the French embraced these American fictions peopled with ordinary men and women determined to forge their own destinies.
Jim Harrison
An admired writer of the American West, as well as poet and essayist, Jim Harrison divided his time between Michigan, his birthplace, Montana, his home, and the American Indian plains of Arizona. In Paris for the launch of the French translation of Julip,2 a collection of three novellas—Julip, The Seven-Ounce Man, and The Beige Dolorosa, his French publisher Christian Bourgois invited him to present at the Village Voice.
On May 16, 1995, a sturdy, jovial man in a floral-print shirt came into the bookshop accompanied by his longstanding friend and translator Brice Matthieussent. As we shook hands, Harrison alluded to the wild night just spent with some French pals, touring the famous bars of the capital, already whetting our appetite for his countless vivid anecdotes.
In his introduction, Matthieussent mentioned that Jim was often compared to Hemingway. “Both are natives of Michigan,” he told us, “and, confronted with perilous situations, both are ready to show their manhood.” Interrupting him, our author declared that he did not like Hemingway as “he had built up an image of himself as a macho hunter and fisherman prone to violence and never got out of this characterization. As for his style, a style that is perfect is one that says you’re dead.”3
Matthieussent then focused on the pivotal role of Edward Curtis in Harrison’s life. This American ethno-photographer of Native Americans was a nomad who had documented tribes and their specific cultures. He was the tutelary figure for Harrison, who was deeply interested in Native American cultures and their folklore, particularly in myths of metamorphosis of man into animal and vice versa. Traveling from one reservation to another, his mentor had collected legends and anecdotes of such radical changes.4
One of Harrison’s favorite characters, if not his alter ego, is Brown Dog, a vagabond half-man, half-dog, who becomes a bear in his dreams. At night, his life depends on his bearskin, and when it is stolen from him while he sleeps, he goes searching for it everywhere in an effort to recover his bear identity. It seems that the line between animals and humans is very thin, even diffuse in Harrison’s fiction.
In his novel Dalva, a coyote’s smile resembles that of a human being, and Julip, a trainer of hunting dogs, is said to handle men the way she handles her dogs.5 All in all, the writer’s animals are often even seen in a better light than men, as with Brown Dog, a man with an animal “soul” who, banished to the fringes of society, becomes the only character who is totally free in his physical movements and unrestrained thoughts.
Most dominant in all of Harrison’s works of fiction and poetry is the presence of bears. “I have four bears I regularly check on in North Michigan,” Harrison announced with fatherly pride. “There was that bear who lived in a cabin close by. He was enormous, some three hundred pounds. When I would come back at night from a bar, he would push his face on the side of the window as if to lift it. If there were too many bugs in the summer, he would roll about in the dirt, get into the river, and come back and roll again, all covered with mud, and look over at me. ‘Ah, ah! how wonderful!’ he seemed to gush.”6
In the poem “My Friend the Bear” he recalls with emotion “her huge head on my shoulder / her breathing like a god’s.” Yet this sacred animal is also the prey of hunters. With a heavy heart, Julip recalls the anonymous shooting of a bear cub that had ventured close to her house. She rushed out and saw the cub was in its last throes of suffering. In an analogous poem “Bear,” “[he] died standing up / paws on log / howling. Shot / right through the heart.” After visualizing these two scenes for us, Harrison spoke at length of the violence in America in all its forms, an issue of great concern to him.7
In his final novella, The Beige Dolorosa, a retired professor is a bird-lover who has undertaken an eccentric project “à la Apollinaire”8 to rename all the birds of America. “Their names are so boring,” the author quipped, “so trivial, like that bird called ‘Brown Thatcher.’ [laughter] I renamed it ‘Beige Dolorosa’; it’s a much nicer name, don’t you think? Yet I got a letter from the Audubon Bird Watch Society saying that you must not change the names of birds, such as Booby. Suddenly, I was a threat to the birds. I told them that there was one name I wouldn’t change, and it was ‘Hot Sunny and Get Wet.’”9 [more laughter]
He next confided that every night in his hotel overlooking the elegant Matignon Gardens10 he heard an owl hooting, and asked his audience, “Would someone know what kind of owl it might be?” . . . long silence. His attention to the bird’s cries above the city’s roaring traffic once again highlights this poet’s acute sensitivity to all kinds of animal life, even in an urban setting.
Nevertheless, this author of some eighteen collections of verse is not a romantic. When someone asked him if nature was comforting, a sort of refuge or redemption, he replied, “None of those. Nature is not a palliative. One man enters the forest caring for animals, another comes and kills them . . . Watch a bear and you’ll realize he is your cousin.”
Poster for a reading by Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Raban, introduced by Edmund White at the Village Voice Bookshop, June 26, 1987.
Raymond Carver
Reading the short stories of Raymond Carver, the writer from the scenic states of Oregon and Washington, one looks in vain for the spectacular landscapes of his homelands. Although nature is ever present in his poetry (river fly-fishing is his favorite outdoor activity), Carver’s prose is about people, ordinary men and women in a quandary who tend to reveal themselves in their confusion, fragility, and anguish. The writer conveys these states with empathy, using spare words, even silences.
With some emotion, I remember the first time the author appeared at the Village Voice on April 7, 1987. He was to read from his collection of short stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please11 in the context of its French publication. Bundled up in a beige trench coat and looking almost “bearish,” as his good friend Richard Ford once described him, Carver had a gentle look on his face that emanated kindness and vulnerability.
Edmund White, who was to introduce him, first acknowledged the writer Peter Taylor in the room. Taylor’s novel, A Summons to Memphis,12 had just been awarded the Ritz Hemingway Prize that afternoon during a reception at the Ritz hotel itself.* Then Carver reminded the audience of Taylor’s role in giving the short story its rightful place in American literature.
Our author had already emerged as the advocate of a pared-down style that was being taught in writing workshops all over the States. Often called the “American Chekhov,” Carver saw himself as a poet whose “poetry is a song, and often the song of the essential,” as the writer Denis Hirson13 defined him many years later.
This word “essential” pinpoints his art as one whose objective is to dive deeply into his characters, revealing their thoughts, concerns, and feelings, by suggesting rather than describing. That evening, Carver read “Collectors,” “the one I still prefer of all my stories,”14 he told us. It was the same story he had read in 1976 at the Southern Methodist University of Dallas when Richard Ford was in the audience. “Carver’s reading,” Ford wrote in his 1998 New Yorker article “Good Raymond,” was “a startling experience, wondrous in all ways.”15 Meeting that night for the first time, the two writers became friends for life.
As in all his short fiction, nothing much happens in “Collectors,” at least on the surface: a man is alone at home, “waiting for news from the North.” His pacing back and forth and his regular glances at the window and at the mail slot in the door betray acute anxiety. Suddenly, a man shows up at the door, a salesman forcing his way through to demonstrate his wares, in this case, a vacuum cleaner. What follows is an absurd sequence as if from a silent movie, with each character obstinately locked into his own obsession. Unsuccessful in his sales pitch, the salesman finally packs up his things and rushes outside, inadvertently collecting, in his haste, a letter just dropped on the floor.
Referring to this story, Carver had already said in another interview that “many people do find it hard to communicate, and there’s always a mystery in every story. Something else is going on under the surface. But things get said, do get done. Sometimes, the meanings are a little askew, but things do transpire.”16
Carver is often seen as the writer of the ordinary man boxed into his specific social category, but, in fact, his attention is focused on the inner thoughts and hidden emotions of his characters and their difficulties: “My stories are never about the social, but the personal,”17 he insisted to us that evening. Years later, in a conversation with Robert Altman, the director of the film Short Cuts based on a number of Carver’s stories, the latter’s widow, poet Tess Gallagher, likewise confessed to him that she “had missed the interiority of Carver’s characters in the film.” Altman’s movie was “more societal than Ray was in his work.”18
After their tour in Europe, Carver and Tess were back at the Village Voice on June 26, 1987, this time for a joint reading with his friend, the rising young American novelist Richard Ford, and the British travel writer Jonathan Raban, all three recently published by Christopher MacLehose (Collins Harvill), who had arranged the evening. Edmund White introduced these three authors to a packed house.
A strikingly handsome man, Ford was expected to present a passage from Rock Springs, his collection of stories recently published in New York. Instead, he read from his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, published in the US in 1976 and just out in Great Britain.19 Beforehand, White had compared Ford’s style and technique to Hemingway’s “naked dialogue in action.” “But there is a difference,” he went on, stressing the fact that Ford’s characters, “seemingly tough and resilient, are also fragile: a false step, one false response in a dialogue, or a lack of emotional intelligence and everything can derail.”20
Next, Jonathan Raban’s Coasting21 took us on a sailing journey around the British Isles in search of memories of the places and people of his youth. Dropping anchor in local harbors along its western coast, he met and gave voice to fishermen and the populations of small towns, all hard-hit by Thatcher’s economic policies and her distant and costly war in the Falklands.
Carver closed the evening with his poem “In a Marine Light near Sequim, Washington” from his collection In a Marine Light.22 His reading called up the ubiquitous miracle of words that allows the poet to be driving along the Pacific Ocean with his wife next to him, and, at the same time, be in Paris: “The beauty of driving / that country road. Talking of Paris, our Paris . . . / And then you finding that place in the book/and reading to me about Anna Akhmatova’s stay there with / Modigliani . . . / Them sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
This poem evokes two places close to his heart—his home, Port Angeles, Washington, on the Pacific Ocean, and Paris, “our Paris,” weaving together the here and there and the now and then, the Luxembourg Gardens two steps away from the bookshop where he was presently reciting these lines.
After the event, we all went to La Cafetière, a restaurant on the rue Dauphine, close to the Village Voice, where Bruce Chatwin, a young British author renowned for his art and travel writings, joined us. His book Songlines, retracing his steps along the trails of the Australian Aboriginals, had recently come out in England to critical acclaim. An art expert turned globetrotter, there was something of a Rimbaud in him. Shod in wooden clogs that night, he was wearing the traditional black overalls of Norman peasants, once adopted by the Impressionist painters.
It was a warm and friendly gathering of publishers and authors. They all knew one another, and we could feel lightness in the air, sitting together around the table, happily chatting, drinking, eating, and exchanging anecdotes and memories of other get-togethers. British publisher Christopher MacLehose and his wife Koukla hosted this celebratory dinner, bringing together their authors—Ray Carver and his wife Tess Gallagher, Richard Ford and Jonathan Raban, Carver’s French publisher Olivier Cohen, and author Edmund White accompanied by his close friend Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, the literary agent who presided over a Parisian salon at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Edmund entertained us all with “beau monde” anecdotes, told with his usual wit. Everyone looked happy, untouched by the future. A year later, Ray Carver and Bruce Chatwin would be gone.
In the weeks following Carver’s passing, Tess sent me a framed picture of his last port of call, a shrub of multicolored flowers in a field overlooking the Pacific Ocean that blended into the hazy sky of Port Angeles. And a few years later, she returned to Paris with her latest collection of poems, Moon Crossing Bridge. She read some of them that alluded to her life with Carver and, more particularly, her moving “Embers”: “To speak aloud at a grave / breaks silence so another heat / shows through. Not speaking, but the glow / of what we spoke.”23
Richard Ford
After his first appearance at our bookstore with Carver in the summer of 1987, Richard Ford returned to the Village Voice on March 29, 1989, this time to present his collection of short stories Rock Springs.24 In a sense, this reading was a tribute to his friend “Good Raymond” who had died a few months earlier. He had previously written that it was Carver’s “infectious sentences . . . so easy to write, it seemed, so natural, with their concision and strong feeling” that had reconciled him with the short story genre: “Stories had failed me and reading Ray’s suddenly made the prospect of short stories appealing again.”25
Yet he specified that Carver did not have any real influence on his work. As Ford understood Carver’s experience, it was “simply to be moved by what you like, to understand you can never replicate it, to feel encouraged, and then to move on alone.”26
Edmund White introduced our guest, calling Ford a key participant in the renewal of contemporary American literature: “In these stories, like in his novels,” he pointed out, “the author fulfills with extraordinary energy and remarkable depth and range of feelings the writer’s mission which, according to Gérard de Nerval,27 is ‘to analyze sincerely what his characters feel under serious conditions.’”28
Cool but with a commanding presence, Ford read “Optimists,” a story of shattered dreams, in which nothing has prepared its protagonists to face the tragedy that has suddenly befallen them. A man has accidentally killed his neighbor, and his family members, who had always tried to be “decent people,” are crushed by the randomness of this act: the man disappears into the night, his son enrolls in the army, and his wife’s life is turned upside down. “What’s going to happen to these three characters?” Ford asked, “How will they keep on going? What will it take to find the strength to live their new lives as best as possible?” These are the questions that come from a writer profoundly interested in thwarted human destinies.
Someone in the audience saw these characters as victims. “No,” Ford retorted, adamantly rejecting this interpretation. “These characters are men in the dark, but they are left with the possibility to grope their way out of the situation and reinvent a new life for themselves.” In this sense, there is a major difference between Carver’s characters, often stuck in a dead end, and Ford’s protagonists who “are given a chance, even if the prospect is far from being inviting.”29 When facing a pivotal moment in life with a crucial decision to be made, a direction to be taken—falling by the wayside or keeping on—how is one to make the right choice?
Richard Ford, Village Voice reading, March 29, 1989. © C. Deudon
These are Ford’s existential interrogations in his fiction that traces the inner journey of his characters in seemingly no-win situations. For him, the only way out is through the process of thinking, searching, interrogating, or meditating in an effort to know oneself, so as to make the right choice. “The novel,” he said, “is one that combines thought, meditation, insights, yet is deeply grounded in the daily realities of the hero.” In fact, he would much later insist that “these are never intellectual discursions, but always arising from the lived experience.”30
In the novels The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land that form his Bascombe trilogy,31 Ford follows his central character Frank Bascombe through the three decisive stages of his adult life, bringing on a flux of thoughts and philosophical insights.
In The Sportswriter, Frank Bascombe has suffered considerable setbacks: the loss of his regular job as a sportswriter for a newspaper, a divorce, and the shattering death of a child. In Independence Day, through his new job as a realtor, he wills himself out of his slump by reaching out to others, and especially his elder son, estranged since the divorce of his parents and the fate of his small brother. Finally, in The Lay of the Land, Bascombe has entered the autumn of his life, and, on one Thanksgiving weekend, his mind is preoccupied by the political uncertainty and social disarray of his country—Bill Clinton’s impeachment, George W. Bush’s election, and 9/11, but just as equally, the real intimations of his own mortality.
Ford’s fiction of introspective exploration is also a literature of displacement, a central motif of much contemporary fiction. “Changing places” comes to mean looking for a new house and, in fact, a better life. As a realtor, Bascombe explores the nooks and crannies of his country, helping people from all strata of society find the house of their dreams. This new home will allow them “to go up” to a better, more secure rung of life. In addition, he also becomes the fomenter of the unrealistic dreams of these house-hunters who, more often than not, end up bitterly disappointed with their choices.
This gap between dreams and realities reveals the author’s rather dark sense of humor, and his deft irony often slipped into an anecdote about himself: “I probably looked at six hundred houses,” Ford confessed, “driving hours and days looking for the one I had in mind—on a hilltop . . . only to put there a disfiguring house! Hilarious! You need a dose of self-irony here not to go to despair, but you’re safe if you can say to yourself, ‘This is ridiculous.’”32
As Ford had alluded to his nomadic past, having lived in Mississippi, Vermont, New Jersey, and now in Montana, someone in the audience wondered what had compelled him to move to so many different places.33
Ford: “I’m from Mississippi, and Mississippians have a lot to explain to themselves. When you think of all the stresses in Faulkner and Eudora Welty . . . Coming from Mississippi caused me to be the kind of a guy I am and the writer I am.”
Q: “Is constant movement compatible with reflection and writing?”
Ford: “Movement through space can reflect inner movement, change inside. The American dream is about conquest which is movement.”
Q: “Is Frank Bascombe your alter ego?”
Ford: “My character Frank Bascombe is not me in all kinds of ways. Making up a character represents my sense of will: this is what I want to do. This is what ‘author’ means, the one who authorizes. Bascombe is entirely made up out of language, out of dialogues, of phrases I’ve heard. The excitement that comes from reading a novel is not what’s going on in someone’s head, walking, shopping, etc. . . . The excitement comes from the language we have on the page in front of us. For me, language is one kind of action. This is what I do in my novels. Much of my time is spent getting bad words out and right words in the right places.”
Richard Ford concluded his stimulating discussion with this reflection on the relationship between the novel and the reader: “I think that novels are supposed to bring you, the reader, back to your own life, with a great sense of its importance, and this is accomplished by having the characters pay attention to life and their thinking, brought to you through language.”
Russell Banks
The author of more than a dozen novels and six collections of short stories, Russell Banks gave three readings at the Village Voice. The first one was on January 27, 1987, for the launch of the French publication of Continental Drift,34 a novel with powerful resonance years after it had come out. In it, a blue-collar worker at the end of his rope quits his job and leaves his family for Florida, hoping for a better life. What awaits him is a nightmare that involves the smuggling of Haitian migrants into the country. According to Banks, “the novel’s title points to the explosive social and political collisions created by displacements of populations inside and between countries: a contemporary and ongoing issue the world over.”35
Some twenty years later, on November 17, 2006, he returned to the Village Voice, this time to present his eleventh novel, The Darling,36 the story of the American Hannah Musgrave, a former member of the 1970s radical Weather Underground, who fled to West Africa, fleeing a US court of justice. Banks read the first pages of his work, projecting us into the past life of his protagonist. She had just woken up from a dream about Africa with a vague premonition that she is to return where she once was a wife and mother of three boys.
Since coming back to her native New England, she has been running a commercial farm, trying to submerge the “terrible years” in Liberia in the “dark waters of her memory.” Nevertheless, she continues to be haunted by the memory of her lost family and the rescued chimpanzees she had to abandon to the civil war raging there.
Russell Banks, Village Voice Bookshop reading, March 4, 2008. © Flavio Toma
“What incited the male Banks to explore this figure of Hannah, this inspiring female character from our generation?” a woman asked.
Banks: “The Darling was generated remembering my twenties, a time of activism with the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests. There were lots of women in them and yet we, as young men, did not pay much attention to those women who, in fact, put themselves at risk, really sacrificing much more of their lives than men did. I started to think how wonderful they had been then, and wondered who they were now at sixty.”
Q: “Why this choice of Africa where Hannah fled from America? Why Liberia and not another country?”
Banks: “I was interested in the history of the relation between Liberia and the United States. I wanted to get a feel of where the ferocity of Liberia’s civil war came from, one of unspeakable violence. I had to research this special link with America, especially when I became involved in the project of my novel Cloudsplitter37 about John Brown and the early abolitionist movement. The history of Liberia is a complex, complicated relationship with the United States since its founding and up to the Liberian Civil War, which erupted in 1991. That history is like an umbilical cord that stretched from Liberia to the US, spreading poison. Having investigated this link, I wanted to write that particular chapter of the race history of the US.”
It is true that Hannah is an exceptional person who has undertaken each one of her projects with passion and compassion: from youthful protests for justice within the civil rights movement, to the sanctuary for chimpanzees she set up in Liberia while braving death all around her, to starting, later in life, a farm, a commercial operation she runs in the middle of the Adirondacks.
At the request of the audience, Banks read the excerpt in which Hannah is back in Liberia in order to find out what has happened to her chimpanzees. Their shadows and the echoes of their plaintive cries now haunt the small island of burnt dry grass in the middle of the river where she had once brought them to safety. This passage aroused so much emotion in the audience that people were curious about where such interest in chimpanzees came from.
Banks: “This is difficult to explain, but the element that brought everything together is exactly the chimpanzees. I came upon a sanctuary near my home, in Quebec of all places, just across the Canadian border, with chimpanzees rescued after being abused in medical and pharmaceutical experimentation. Visiting other sanctuaries in Atlanta and Sierra Leone, West Africa, I began to notice that the people who devoted their lives to protecting chimpanzees and high primates were generally women, very much like the ones I had known in the ’60s and ’70s in the civil rights and anti-war movements. They were from privileged backgrounds, white, well-educated women, almost an archetype. They had strong opinions, strong political principles, very much like my character Hannah Musgrave, and it all brought the material together for me.
Hannah is not the only unusual woman in Russell Banks’s fiction. In his novel The Reserve,38 launched at the Village Voice on March 4, 2008, he brings to life Vanessa Cole, a New England heiress and mysterious woman, a Baudelairian female figure, “beautiful as a dream of stone,” a sort of antithesis to Hannah.39 Her character as a femme fatale is most unexpected from the author of novels concerned with social issues. She is involved in a romance with Jordan Grove, a local artist of international fame. Their love affair unfolds against the fairy-tale backdrop of the “vast enclosed space between lake and forest, and mountain and sky . . . at the exact center of wilderness” in the Adirondack Mountains, the author’s home and beloved retreat.*
Nonetheless, this romantic pairing that takes place in this exclusive estate is “doomed not only by their mutual narcissistic involvement,” but also by larger events. As the story takes place in the very narrow framework of a summer, between July 14 and September 1, 1936, threatening clouds of history are gathering on the horizon.
Like other contemporary American writers, the author alludes to historical circumstances to contextualize his novels, but for Banks, “a major event ought to be written with clarity and with coherence if it is to be recorded as a historical document, whereas in fiction it goes differently. As we are sitting here, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going on and, however boring and pressing our lives may be, these wars are the italicized part of our lives right now. Four months away, 1937 was not just any year. It was the year Jordan40 engaged in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought in Spain, and the Hindenburg Zeppelin exploded into flames over the northern shore of the New Jersey coast.”
Both events were “the rising ashes foreboding the forthcoming disaster, and such major events,” Banks insisted, “I could only apprehend them in a metaphorical way. What I was trying to do in my novel was to give the shadows, as it were, of the historical context of the lives of my characters as they engage in betrayal, adultery, and complicated kinds of domestic events.”41
Returning to the here and now, he saw the explosion of the Hindenburg as an echo of what happened on 9/11. “It is the only approach I can have for historical events of that scope,” he concluded.