Napkin dispenser, Elgin, SC

I've decided I will no longer ask any writer about their so-called "writing process." I no longer give a shit. The act of writing is the same for everyone: I fart around forever, and then I finally get down to work. It was probably even true for Shakespeare.

John Banville: "Writing a novel, even a bad novel, is a fiendishly difficult task."

John Banville’s The Sea is a haunted novel.

Having recently lost his wife to cancer, an aging art historian named Max Morden retreats to the seaside inn where he spent summers as a youth. Here he finds himself dealing with ghosts from the near and distant past, as he reflects on his wife, his distant relationship with an adult daughter, and the strange, unresolved mystery of a girl he loved long ago.

Each memory sparks another, forcing Max to come to terms both with himself and an uncertain future. 

The Sea won the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

Author Banville -- who will be in town next week to discuss the novel as part of the University of South Carolina’s Open Book series -- took a few questions by e-mail.

FREE-TIMES: Was there any single event that inspired The Sea?

BANVILLE: I never know where a book begins - I seem not to start anywhere but to be on the way, before I know it. I can look back at my manuscripts and see exactly when and how I wrote the first line, but that always comes long after the book has started up in my head. I can't even remember inventing Max. I was in my late fifties when I wrote the book, and was beginning to feel the encroachment of old age, and it was inevitable, I suppose, that I should begin to look back towards childhood. My own summers by the sea long ago found their way into the book. However, I have no idea why I chose also to write about illness and bereavement. Fiction is a mysterious business.

FREE-TIMES: Max begins as a morose and sad figure, but as the book goes along, he tests our sympathy. Did you see him as a whole from the beginning, or did your conception of him shift as the book went along?

BANVLLE: I imagine he was fairly well 'fixed' before I began to the book. He's not a very appealing figure, is he. But like all my narrators, he is at least honest, insofar as he can be. I remember a critic in Germany asking how on earth I had written such a book without falling even once into sentimentality. I took it as a high compliment. The only answer I could give him is that art is never sentimental, and if it is, it turns into kitsch. I would like to think that Max has much sentiment, but no sentimentality.

FREE-TIMES: There’s a quote from Nabokov’s lecture on Ulysses that came to mind while reading this book. He said that Joyce’s novel was about the hopeless past, the ridiculous and tragic present, and the pathetic future. The Sea has those very features in it. Max, from the vantage point of a ridiculous, aimless middle age, examines life for the first time, scrutinizing a past he can’t resolve, facing a future that doesn’t give him much to cling to.

BANVILLE: Nabokov's observation is somewhat trite, don't you think? All fictional art deals with 'the hopeless past, the ridiculous and tragic present, and the pathetic future.' On the other hand, in The Sea the hopelessness, the ridiculousness and the pathos are shot through on every page with radiant light. That was my intention, anyway. After all, for all its terrors, failures and betrayals, life is a glory.

FREE-TIMES: The prose is very rich, and perfectly motivated. As an art critic – even a self-proclaimed mediocre one – Max is deeply observant of colors and sounds, a kind of artist himself in his way, as he tries to recall every last detail of his memories.

BANVLLE: I tried, in my teenage years, to be a painter. I failed miserably, but the effort did teach me to look at the world with a painterly eye. For me, the art of fiction is an attempt to conjure up and to illuminate the world, or the little fragment of the world that is contained in a novel. The novelist, like the painter, must be all concentration. I take my lead from Cato the Censor: Rem tene, verbum sequentur - grasp the object, and the words will follow.

FREE-TIMES: There’s a lot of story to The Sea but I wouldn't describe it as plot-driven. It's a mystery story, on a couple of levels, as well as an intensely interior book. Was it difficult to balance those sides of it?

BANVILLE: Writing a novel, even a bad novel, is a fiendishly difficult task. The aim is to strike a balance, to weigh part against part, sentence against sentence - in a word, to find a harmony.

FREE-TIMES: I seem to recall John Updike saying that most of his characters are losers. I think that’s partly why they’re so compelling – and why this one is as well. Failures have more to reflect on, and they have richer interior lives. Have you ever, or would you ever, write about a well-adjusted human being?

BANVILLE: Have you ever encountered a well-adjusted human being? Our predicament in the world leaves us constantly ill-adjusted. This is what makes life interesting.

FREE-TIMES: How did winning the Man Booker Prize change your life?

BANVILLE: It gave me a little money, and a brief moment of fame, among people who read books such as mine, which is a small minority. The prize is bound to have brought The Sea to the attention of many readers who would otherwise have missed it. For this reason alone prizes are important. They are not, of course, any kind of real measurement of one's work - and any writer who thinks otherwise is deluded.

John Banville’s The Sea is the focus of next week’s Open Book series at the University of South Carolina. USC’s Master of Fine Arts Director Elise Blackwell will lead a discussion of the book this Monday, March 25, at 6 p.m, at the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library on the USC campus. Author John Banville will talk about the book on Wednesday, March 27, at 6 p.m. at the same location. Both events are open to the public. 

(Published in the web version of the March 20, 2013 issue of the Free-Times.)

Great chat with Bill. He couldn't have been nicer.


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Soooooo pissed. Phone interview with Bill Maher scheduled for 2:30 at F-T office. I get there in plenty of time, proceed to wait and wait and before e-mailing his flack and asking where's Bill. Oh, I'm sorry ... we meant 2:30 Pacific...

NEW RULE: When you say "He'll call you at 2:30," that means MY 2:30, not YOURS, dickhead. Totally unprofessional. Any PR pro knows you get these things straight.

This is my last celeb interview. They always take a day and they're never worth it.

Now watch him not call at 5:30 pm.

Pacific time. Shit.


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Marilynne Robinson: Writing is about "finding language that works the way it is meant to."

When Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead was published in 2004, it was an event in a couple of ways.

One, it was a welcome return from a writer who hadn’t published a novel since her first, Housekeeping, in 1980. Two, it was an unusually sympathetic portrayal of an unabashedly religious protagonist. It was an anachronism, and like nothing else in contemporary fiction.

The lead character is John Ames, a dying preacher living in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s. Ames, telling his story in the form of an extended letter to his young son, reflects on his own mystical upbringing, ruminates over theological mysteries, and faces up to his own anxieties for the future – which are only heightened by the arrival in Gilead of the one person in the world he can’t stand.

Widely acclaimed by critics and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Gilead is the first book featured in the University of South Carolina’s five-week Open Book series.

FREE-TIMES: I’ll start with a question you’ve been asked a lot. Housekeeping was published in 1980. Gilead didn’t arrive for another 24 years, during which time you also published a non-fiction book on England’s nuclear industry and a book of essays. Was Gilead a long-time brewing? What was the hardest part about bringing it to completion?

ROBINSON: Gilead was actually rather easy for me to write. It presented itself to my imagination, so to speak, and from that point on I felt pretty secure about the course it was taking. I was not really thinking about writing fiction during those twenty-four years. I intended to do it, but the real impetus, the voice in my head, was not there. I educated myself during those years, simply because I didn't feel I knew enough to trust what I thought I did know. Part of the education was Scripture and theology, and part of it was the history of the Middle West, where I had come to live. John Ames emerged from all this, unbidden, really. But there he was, and he led me through the book.

FREE-TIMES: Your prose has poetic rhythm. There are passages from your novels – the first sentence in Gilead, for example – that could pass for poetry if they were just typeset that way. There were sentences in Housekeeping that made me think of Wallace Stevens. Do you read a lot of poetry? Which poets do you keep coming back to?

ROBINSON: The poets I come back to are Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. And Walt Whitman. I know there are any number of others, living and dead, whose work would enrich mine. I think I stay with these few because every time I go back to them I see more. They are inexhaustible. This says something profound about the artful use of language.

FREE-TIMES: Gilead is about a lot of things, but the crux of it seems to me to be about the struggle for forgiveness and the power of grace. Did it start with that idea?

ROBINSON: I can't really say Gilead started with an idea. It would be truer to say it started with a mind. I knew that Ames was honest, prayerful, reflective, learned in his own way. And solitary by habit. These were the givens--the rest was exploration.

FREE-TIMES: The novel is also about the joy and frustration of writing. Ames’ life is full of books and sermons, but he fears that in the end maybe it isn’t worth much. He doubts his ability to communicate the depth of his thoughts – “I felt the poverty of my remarks” is a typical comment -- even though, in the writing of the narrative itself, he reveals more of himself than he intended. Is Ames close to you as a writer?

ROBINSON: I suppose he is closer to me than to most people. A great part of the interest in writing is the attempt to find language that works the way it is meant to. The other part of the interest in writing is that when language seems to go off on its own it can be much better than whatever was intended, much more complex and alive. It has often seemed to me that a preacher who attempts earnestly to be adequate to his occasion must feel in acute forms the poverty, or the unruliness, of language.

FREE-TIMES: On a purely religious level, how much of Marilynne Robinson is in John Ames? In recent years, you’ve clashed with new atheists like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins over whether science and religion are incompatible. Ames, likewise, is a veteran arguer against skepticism (which he understands at an exceptionally high level).

ROBINSON: Religion in America has largely stepped back from its own intellectual history, and has conceded this ground to skepticism in virtually any form, however crude. Real skepticism is simply an aspect of engagement, a part of the cultural conversation. Only because American Christians know nothing of their own heritage of thought are they daunted by these noisy onslaughts we have seen recently. John Ames comes from the time before total capitulation. He has resources that enable him to consider skepticism without being cowed by it.

FREE-TIMES: Did the critical response to Gilead surprise you? A book with a central character who is not only devout but also deeply intelligent and appealing isn’t normally the kind of book you think of as getting much traction.

ROBINSON: Gilead's reception has surprised me. It is in about thirty languages now, including Arabic and Persian. One of the great privileges of a writer's life can come from the fact that a book can be a testing of the cultural waters. Now I know that readers in Muslim countries can be receptive to a book about a Congregational preacher in Iowa. This is a splendid and reassuring thing to know. As for its reception in America, our expectations are based on the endlessly reiterated "fact" that our literary culture is essentially secular, and that secular means hostile to religion. Gilead could be offered as evidence that these things are not true. Critics of all sorts have responded to it with great generosity.

[Personal aside: The religion angle actually did get in the way of one otherwise good critic.]

FREE-TIMES: What does winning the Pulitzer Prize do to a person?

ROBINSON: Winning the Pulitzer Prize bestows a very valuable credential. Never afterward do you have to prove that you are a serious person. The dangers of getting this kind of pass are obvious. But the satisfactions are also very real. 

(This originally appeared in the March 13, 2013 issue of the Columbia, SC Free-Times.)

Rough stuff

Get the new Marnie Stern!

That's a note to myself, mainly, since I haven't heard it. There are certain recording artists whose records I buy without knowing a thing about them in advance, and she's one. I just want to know what she's up to. The title of her new one -- The Chronicles of Marnia -- sounds kind of ugh but I don't care, so long as it has her unique verve and vibe.

How times change, Elvis Costello edition

Last night, Elvis Costello took part in a tribute to Prince,
marking a clear change of opinion from, oh, nearly 30 years ago, when he appeared on The Tonight Show, when Joan Rivers was guest-hosting.

Scroll ahead to 6:20:

Best line of the day, so far...

I'm reading a book of correspondence between a pair of fencing lit-wits, Joseph Epstein and Frederic Raphael. Talk turns to Edmund Wilson, who badly embarrassed himself in the pages of the New York Review of Books when he attempted to school Vladimir Nabokov on how to translate Eugene Onegin.

Raphael writes: "...it is one of the greatest of all acts of literary hubris to have crossed dictionaries with Volodya on the Onegin translation; E.W. had only himself to blame when Pushkin came to Shovekin."


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Why do I always load up my iPod with albums when the only thing I ever actually listen to is Louder Than Bombs?


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Reading this book ...




...has led me back to this one...





Not to mention re-learning everything I forgot about Nigeria's civil wars of the 1960s.

Query

Is there anything sadder than self-promotion?


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I never finish reading any Facebook post that begins with the words "I dreamed..."

Got a great interview with Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Gilead I enthusiastically reviewed when it first came out, and which I re-read a couple of weeks ago, finding all of its myriad virtues very, very much intact. She's at the University of South Carolina next week, and while I usually don't all that much care for literary evenings, I kind of can't wait to hear her. Will post the interview next week. In the meantime, I notice in my original review that I said her prose draws to mind Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson -- turns out those are two of her major influences.

Radiolab on the Heimlich Manuever

Radiolab is the only podcast -- and yes, I'm including you, This American Life -- that never disappoints. The recent show -- An Illustrated History of Heimlich -- is an excellent example, a comprehensive story of the still-living doctor who invented everyone's favorite anti-choking device, and his somewhat bizarre medical legacy.

I used the Heimlich Manuever on my daughter once; she was four or five, it was at a church hot dog picnic. Only medical procedure I've ever pulled off with any success, so however strange Dr. Heimlich's other ideas are (like using malaria to cure AIDS) he's still a hero in my book. The Radiolab correspondent didn't sway me in that regard.

Just looked at my Hulu queue. Two Simpsons, one Parks and Rec, four Communitys and three The Offices await. If I can ever crawl out from under this mountain of books.

Funniest obituary I've read in years

I've never heard of the writer Sylvia Smith until now, with her passing. Good career move, as they used to say. The New York Times always has the best obituaries, and this one is sharp and pointed and humorous without being cruel. Almost makes me want to read her book, Misadventures.

More good stuff on her from a 2001 profile in The Telegraph.

Robert Ariail

My Free-Times piece on the political cartoonist most of us locals will always associate with The State newspaper, although he's been gone from there for several years now. Very easy-going, genial man on the phone; probably (hopefully) disappoints politicians who want to get on his good side.

Spoilt

One has a great deal of pleasure out of dogs because one can spoil them as one cannot spoil one's children. If the children are spoiled, one's future is spoilt but dogs one can spoil without any thought of the future and that is a great pleasure.

-- Gertrude Stein




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Today's goals

Today's goals involve Gertrude Stein, Anne Frank, Mary Tyler Moore and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as writing that has nothing to with any of them. And coffee. Lots of coffee.



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Location:Elgin, United States