|
Jane Smiley
Author, A Year at the Races, A Thousand Acres and Good Faith
In conversation with Barbara Lane,, Good Lit Series Director
Barbara Lane: In this book, you work with an animal communicator - we're getting right into the good stuff - who lets you know Hornblower doesn't like his name.
Jane Smiley: I had a horse named Mr. T - he was my first horse as an adult - and I moved to California, and a woman who became my masseuse mentioned that she was also an animal communicator. We used to talk to Mr. T a lot, and he always had many interesting things to say. One time, I went and she had already gone in the stall and started talking to him. He had injured his eye. I looked, and she had her finger on the wall and she was making a square shape. She made another one next to it. He was staring at her hand. She made another. After the fourth one I said, "What are you doing?" She said, "He's telling me how many carrots he needs every day in order to recover from his eye injury." It turned out to be 20 pounds. Each of those squares was a five-pound bag. I guess he tapped his foot at the end of four and said that was enough.
I talked to him with her a lot. He was quite talkative, actually, and very opinionated. Then he died, and even though she remained my masseuse, we didn't talk to the horses much.
Lane: How did she let you know that Hornblower didn't like his name?
Smiley: Lots of times she gets things from the horses first thing in the morning. As I remember, she woke up and Hornblower was knocking on her consciousness. He said that the real problem with his racing career - at that point he hadn't won anything or made much money either - was his name. His name had a low vibration, and it was a low-status name. It started out low and went lower. We explained to him that we couldn't change his name because he'd already raced under that name. He said, well, how about if we always called him by his old nickname, which was Wowie, which the people in the barn didn't know. I said okay. He started earning money right about then.
I never made up my mind about what was going on; I would engage in willing suspension of disbelief, because it was entertaining and because it was productive, even if only in terms of changing my attitude toward the horse. When we first did it with Mr. T, I unconsciously treated him like a big dog. We trotted him around and I'd say, "Walk. Canter." I'd be giving him one-word commands. After the horse communicator and I talked to him many times, it was just sort of natural to converse with him. Maybe all that did was change my body language so I related to him in a different way. Horses have a very astute sense of the body language of the beings around them. At any rate, his and my relationship became much more congenial and satisfying to me and apparently to him, so I'm willing to suspend disbelief.
Lane: They say of girls who are obsessed with horses, it's thought someday they'll have boyfriends and husbands and careers and children, and that's what horses are a substitute for. I've read where you say, in fact, boyfriends and husbands and children and careers are a substitute for horses.
Smiley: I met a woman two weeks ago whose mother was kind of like me. She had gotten out of horses when she was 20 and back into them when she was 30. Her husband referred to the non-horse years as hippo-pause. His advice to young men involved with girls who were giving up horses was to watch out; it doesn't end, it's only hippo-pause.
Lane: When you see a movie with horses in it, you're watching that movie differently than I would watch that movie. You're looking at the horses.
Smiley: I always look at the horses. This started about five years ago. I began seeing two movies. One was the looks on the people's faces and their dialogue, and the other one was the looks on the horses' faces.
It really comes up in a movie that tries to be about horses, The Horse Whisperer: The horses' interpretation of the story was completely different from the people's interpretation of the story. That horse was trying so hard, almost from the beginning, to be friends, and they weren't letting him. He was portrayed in the script as this barely redeemable rogue who had to be roped down and sat on by Robert Redford in order to reclaim him. To the experienced equestrian eye, the horse was saying, "Let me be good, let me be good," all the way from the beginning. He did his best, but he wasn't a very good horse actor.
Lane: You've written what must be several very cinematic novels, because two of your novels at least - A Thousand Acres and The Age of Grief, which was marketed as The Secret Lives of Dentists (I guess The Age of Grief wouldn't have sold as many tickets). Do you ever have that in mind when you're writing, and what is it about your novels and those in particular that lend themselves to cinematic treatment?
Smiley: I have no idea what it was about The Age of Grief that lent itself to cinematic treatment, because it was very internal. It's a wonderful movie. I enjoyed it, even though they shafted me from beginning to end on the financial side. I took my daughter to see it, and those of you who have seen it, you know that there's a two-and-a-half-year-old child in there who never leaves Campbell Scott alone. Every time he has a moment to himself, she shouts, "Daddy, Daddy! Come here right now." That was based on my daughter, who's now 21. I took her to see the movie, and she became quite squirmy in her chair. Afterwards we came out and she said that she wasn't going to take her boyfriend to see that movie because if he saw that movie he would know that her imperious manner was very long term.
Those little girls are as cute as you'll ever see in the movie, and they act just like little girls. They're totally oblivious to the camera. They have their whole little-girl life, and it exists below the level of the parents' life a little bit. I didn't think that was cinematic at all. But A Thousand Acres, of course, is cinematic, because it's based on "King Lear." So I always thought of it as a production of "King Lear."
Lane: You've said there are very few characters in your writing you identify with all. Most of your books aren't at all autobiographical, but The Age of Grief was, because you were married to a dentist -
Smiley: No, I wasn't. I was married to a college professor, but I happened to go the dentist.
Lane: Is this just one of those National Enquirer things?
Smiley: That was a later husband, who left me for our dental hygienist. But he wasn't himself a dentist. He had such bad teeth, it was amazing he could attract a dental hygienist. I do believe that became a bone of contention between them.
Lane: I want to explore this a minute, because many writers' first novel is a thinly disguised autobiography. Then, it seems it's difficult for them to get over themselves. They keep turning up, or their friends keep turning up. You don't do that.
Smiley: My first novel was not an autobiography, but it was about a situation that I had seen firsthand. That was Barn Blind. The second novel, At Paradise Gate, is about three sisters and their mother on the last day of the patriarch's life. That was more or less autobiographical, except I put it in the point of view of my grandmother. I introduced a lot of interesting events that had never happened in my family. That was my stab at the autobiographical book. But my own consciousness I'm not that interested in. I've been there, I've done that, and it's boring to go over it again, so I don't really write about myself, except as a kind of center point or node of observation for other things outside that are more interesting. But The Age of Grief I was in the process of - my marriage was falling apart, and I happened to go to the dentist. The dentists were a couple, and I came out of my dentist. The woman dentist was based on her, and the thing I would notice as I was lying there is that she wore spiked heels all the time. I couldn't understand how she could work all day standing in the big, tall heels. I came out of my appointment and her husband was working on a guy and she happened to say to me that this man, the patient he was working on, was an elderly farmer who had come in, his teeth had been hurting, and he had taken a few shots of whiskey and tried to pull them all with pliers. I had a Henry Jamesian moment. That novella grew out of that particular incident. I didn't realize that I was going to make it be about their marital breakup until after maybe ten pages.
Lane: Certain themes, though, come up again and again in your books. You mentioned Shakespeare as the influence for A Thousand Acres. Good Faith, your most recent novel, has some of that thematic stuff about money, land and greed.
Smiley: If you're writing along and every time you introduce something sentimental, if you promptly follow it with something about money, you never get accused of being sentimental, because money absolutely de-sentimentalizes everything around it. It's like a little radioactive thing. I realized that early on, that if you included enough about money, you could have as many golden retrievers in there as you want.
Lane: You've done a sort-of biography, A Penguin Life, of Charles Dickens, whom you called the first true celebrity, in the modern sense. How was he a celebrity?
Smiley: Dickens became a celebrity because he was very good at exploiting the most popular form of publication, serial publication. It's estimated that of every magazine that sold with a thing in it, probably it was read by 15 people. If he were to sell 50,000 copies, which is what he sold of David Copperfield, then you can imagine that 50,000 times 15 - that would be the equivalent of that kind of a bestseller. His work was so popular that he became very rich. Also, like what we see happen to television personalities: People think that he's their friend. In England, he was popular and beloved, and he was about 32 when he went to Scotland with his wife. He went to Edinburgh for a dinner given in his honor. He wrote back to John Forster after this dinner that men - mature, even old, respected men - had honored him as a national treasure. He was both astounded and gratified that he had somehow become so beloved of people that he would normally himself respect and admire.
When he came to America, though, it was a whole different world, and the nature of his celebrity was really quite astounding and upsetting to him. The Americans would not leave him alone. Every hotel he was at, somebody would hoist themselves up and appear in the window. He'd have to go to a breakfast and then a brunch and then a lunch and then a dinner and then an evening thing. He'd be shaking hands with everybody, and they'd be peering at him and feeling his sleeve to see what he was wearing. He found it maddening to be famous in America. He wrote a wonderful book called American Notes that isn't very long and is really worth reading. That's where he truly became a celebrity. His fame was basically international. People wanted to intrude on his life and pry into his life and figure out what made him tick and what he looked like. They weren't exactly interested in the same things we are. But he did have a celebrity divorce that became the talk of London in the 1850s. I would define a celebrity as a person that was so famous that regular people think that they have a relationship to them that they can make use of. Because I've read all 17 of your books, Mr. Dickens, I can hit you up for a 20-pound loan.
Lane: One of our audience members asks about your favorite Dickens novel.
Smiley: Our Mutual Friend. All of Dickens' novels are about money. Dickens thought a lot about money, because he had a lot of dependents and had to work hard to support them all. Dickens is always trying to reconcile the life of the individual in the city with the vastness of the city. He tried it in several different ways. He tried several different linking institutions, like the circumlocution office in Bleak House or the various things in Little Dorrit. He was always trying to figure out a way to make the individual within the city somehow connect. In Our Mutual Friend he hit upon this great idea, which was simply gossip. There was the person at the center of a piece of gossip, a man found dead in the Thames. Then he went around to all the people that might be interested and we overhear the gossip about him. It all worked. What happens at the end is the good characters are able to have a small community of friends and family in the midst of the vast anonymity of London. This is something that none of the characters in the previous big novels were able to do pretty much after David Copperfield. He had gone through this dark period where he didn't really see the possibility of connection. He came out at the end with an understanding of how to connect.
The thing I love the most about Our Mutual Friend is that it is stylistically perfect from beginning to end. You can open that book like the Bible. It's 850 pages long. You can open it anywhere and read for two pages and every word is just right. It's not that it's just correct, it's that every word sends out little rays that attach themselves to other words that you read earlier in the book or will read later in the book. It's astounding. I don't think he even realized that he was doing that. I think that his own style had become so second nature to him by that time, which is what all writers hope for, that he didn't even have to try. He just had to focus on organizing the story and the style flowed out.
Lane: One of the qualities I loved in Moo was the thread of humanity running through all the characters. Is this common in contemporary literary fiction?
Smiley: I don't know. I have a theory of the novel, which is that every novel is political, no matter what. You can't get away from it. So if you have a novelist like Anne Tyler, who tries very hard to avoid any kind of politics and remain private, the reader misses the political dimension that says How does this fit into the world as we know it? In some sense, it's too private. A second part of my theory is that if you know that your novel is political, then you can understand why certain novels work the way they do. I knew that Moo was about two things. It was selfishness and self-centeredness, and yet it was also about people emerging from their inherent and almost automatic self-centeredness to act together to do a good thing, which is to stop a particular type of exploitation. But then without realizing it, they allow a bad thing to happen, which is the university changing. One of the signs of it is that McDonald's (talk about prophesizing the future) takes over the cafeteria and the employees are sort of thrown out. I wanted to write about that effort to get out of your own concerns and your own narcissism and actually act in the public interest.
But I saw Moo as a comedy. A comedy is always about connecting. The connections that the characters made had to be practical ones. They couldn't just be sentimental or emotional ones. They had to act together in order to do something.
Lane: There was another question from an audience member wanting to know if you - speaking of academic satires - are a fan of David Lodge.
Smiley: Yes. Although, I've read Small World now about three times, and I really enjoy it, but it hasn't quite held up as well as another of his novels, called How Far Can You Go? It follows eight friends from their freshman year at university to the age of 45. They're all believing Catholics, and it's about the contradictoriness of their beliefs as they get older. It's really a wonderful novel.
Lane: You've mentioned all novels being political, in a sense. Do you ever think about writing a novel that's overtly political, or is that kind of material best expressed for you in essays?
Smiley: A protagonist in a novel has to have an inner life. We don't know whether any of our candidates do have inner lives or not. We may have our suspicions that some of them may not have any inner lives at all, and how could they, because they're required to be such extreme extroverts in order to please all the people all the time? I would write novels in which the characters would speculate about politics, but I can't imagine putting a politician in a novel. I don't know any politicians. There's a piece of wonderful criticism by Marxist critic Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel. He points out that the best historical novels are ones in which the protagonist is just an average guy for whom the panorama of history is passing and he is experiencing it. That's how I think of the historical novel. I've never seen a novel about a candidate or a president or something that was convincing. I don't think that we have the insight into them, and I don't think that they have the insight into themselves for them to project their inner life onto the screen the way the average person can.
I remember thinking when Bill Clinton was president and he was fumbling around with the confessional mode that the confessional mode is almost impossible to put over, because you always sound like you're justifying yourself, even when you aren't. So how would they ever tell us about themselves? It will be really interesting to see how Bill Clinton tells us about himself in his book, because his professed intention is to show what it was like to be him, which is a professed intention of empathy rather than sympathy. But if we feel as readers that the empathy is contaminated by a wish for sympathy, then we'll reject it. His editor is Bob Gottlieb, the greatest editor probably alive. Will Bob be able to control Bill? I don't know.
Lane: There was an audience question about whether your move to California had changed you as a writer. I just want to add that A Thousand Acres to many of us really seemed Midwestern. It seems like no coincidence that you moved to California and wrote a novel about real estate.
Smiley: I don't think I was the same writer I was ever. I've always been interested in things, and the thing I would be interested in would dictate to me how I was going to approach it. The only way my values changed when I moved to California was that in Iowa, they're only 4 percent corrupt. My brother graduated from college in 1980 and drove around Iowa registering voters for the Republicans, but don't tell anyone. He was astounded that he was never asked to register any dead people, to register anyone twice. It was incorruptible, the state. So let's say Iowa is 4-5 percent corrupt. I always had this feeling that it could be corrected, it could be made to work there. Even agriculture could be made to work, if people just understood where they were going wrong. California's 100 percent corrupt from the beginning. There was no sense of, you're never going to make the state uncorrupt. You're never going to stop the influence of wealth. You're never going to undo what the Huntingtons or the Crockers did. Why bother? People like it anyway. No matter how high the real estate prices are, no matter how high the taxes are, who wants to be anywhere else?
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein