Excerpt
Situation: Paul Bishop is helping Susan Corbin through a difficult chemotherapy treatment. She has begun to have feelings for him that she won’t acknowledge. Her recently deceased, very flawed husband Tom Corbin appears to her in a fever dream.
Around midnight, Susan suddenly awoke, hearing herself cry out in her dream, “Now, Tom. Now. Please. Please.” As she came to herself she heard Paul rushing to her room. By the time he got there she was fully awake, sitting upright. “My fever is coming up now. I’ve just had a strange dream.”
“What should I do?”
“Get me some aspirin and some acetaminophen, too. I can take the maximum dose of both to knock the fever down. And get some ice and some washcloths. I’m just over 103 right now. Help me to cool down.” Susan didn’t want to tell Paul about her dream. Wearing the clothes he had worn when she first saw him at the public reading at the Riverside Art Museum, Tom had come to her from the shadows. But there was something different about him. He seemed radiantly happy, happy as she had never seen him in life.
“Tell me how it is with you, Tom.”
“You see how I am.”
“Is it because I called you back that you are happy? Were you afraid I wouldn’t call you back?”
“I always knew you would. It’s because at last I can love you simply that I’m happy.”
“Are you at peace now?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know what it would be to be at peace.”
“But do you see love more clearly?”
“I see only the things that are beyond me to change.”
“But you said that now you can finally love me simply.”
“I meant that I am past hurting you anymore.”
“I’ve never given up on you. I will never stop wanting you.”
“I couldn’t have faced you. I had done too much to you.”
“But now you do face me. Will I see you this way again, after everything is over?”
“You see me now. See me while you can.”
She felt, through her entire body, the pang of hopeless desire. “I loved you so hard, Tom, so hard.”
“I couldn’t live up to that love.”
“If I had loved you better, I would have made a way for you to come to me again. I loved you too greedily.”
“It was me who had to find the way, and I didn’t.”
“I would have you over again, Tom, just as you were. Even now. Even with everything still wrong between us.”
“I’ve given you a gift. I’ve set you free of me.”
“I don’t want to be free of you. Let me come where you are.”
“I want you to live. You must do that without me.”
“But it’s you I want to live with.”
And still in her dream, she rushed out of her bed to take him in her arms, and her arms closed on nothing. Then she was sitting up, shuddering as her fever continued to rise, with her tangled sheets and blanket thrown on the floor, and only Paul was there, asking how she was. And asking again.
Interview
1: Tell us a little about yourself and what got you in to writing?
I came very late to writing fiction, after teaching English for more than forty years at Brandeis University. I wasn’t a complete novice about writing, however. I did publish three books of poetry over my career, and of course a great deal of scholarship. But every English professor believes they have a novel in them, and as I approached retirement I decided to see whether I could make one work. I was astounded at how much I had to learn, how little four decades of teaching students how to read novels had taught me about how to write one.
2: Do you have a favourite time and place where you write?
I write best when I am under pressure to do something at work. Somehow the sense that I am stealing time for something of my own energizes me.
3: Where do your ideas come from?
Most of my ideas arise from situations I have been thinking about for years. Almost fifty years ago, when I was teaching in Reno, friend of my roommate really was randomly murdered while he was on his way to tell his wife he was leaving her. I thought my roommate would write a novel about it, but he died in 2001, leaving the novel unwritten, although he did publish poems about the murder. The novel I am working on now goes even further back. In college I noticed that one of the volumes of a series of proceedings of the International Genetics conference was much thinner than the others. It turned out that that conference was going on in Edinburgh during the week before the Second World War broke out. This offered a great situation for intrigue, since the Soviet geneticists who had originally organized it were being arrested by Stalin, who had turned against genetics as a science. The American geneticists were there to make a statement against eugenics, although they all had had brushes with it earlier. The Polish geneticists were stranded in Britain, mostly for the rest of their lives. There were a number of German geneticists there, a surprising number of them women, but they don’t seem to have written nazi-inflected papers. I wondered what was going through their minds.
4: Do you have a plan in your head of where the story is going before you start writing or do you let it carry you along as you go?
I write a great deal of notes, although mostly they are just reflections, not actual plans. I go in with a good idea of how the characters work, and what the main plot turns will be. And I plan in more detail a few chapters ahead as I’m going. But I have discovered that as I am actually writing my ideas change as they go, and I do a great deal of doubling back to make sure the plot developments are consistent. I also make a detailed time line as I go. Sometimes the characters demand from me a different course than I had originally planned for them.
5: What genre are your books and what drew you to that genre?
I write relatively dark literary novels about the vicissitudes of love. I have a long interest in the novels of Hawthorne, James, and Wharton. I’m interested in the contradictions and double-binds characters become entangled in, how their best intentions never quite get them out of trouble, how their wills are divided against themselves at every moment.
6: What dream cast would you like to see playing the characters in your latest book?
I would want Jessica Chastain to play Susan Corbin, and Brad Pitt to play Tom Corbin. I loved the role Jessica Chastain played in The Tree of Life. I would like Anthony Edwards for Paul Bishop. I would want Helena Bonham Carter for Rachel.
7: Do you read much and if so who are your favourite authors?
Other than Hawthorne, James, and Wharton, I also really love the Soviet novelist Vassily Grossman, whose dark epic about Stalingrad, Life and Fate, captures what it is to live in a dangerous world in which it is impossible to live without humiliating compromises. And I will read anything by Marilynne Robinson. But Robert Penn Warren tops my list.
8: What book/s are you reading at present?
I’m going back and forth between Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Dickens’ Bleak House. I’m also very much loving Lily King’s Heart the Lover.
9: What is your favourite book and why?
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is the best novel about politics by anybody. It isn’t really a novel about how power corrupts, but about how taking moral shortcuts in the service of moral aims puts a tension between the means of good and the good those means are supposed to serve. Power does corrupt in All the King’s Men but it does so by appealing to a character’s virtues, demanding that the character break institutions in order to do the necessary things, until even the character cannot tell the difference between a revolutionary morality and mere love of power.
10: What advice would you give for someone thinking about becoming a writer?
It’s never too late! Allen Levi’s beautiful Theo of Golden gives hope to every novelist starting out at 70.
11: What are the best Social Media Sites for people to find out about you and your work?
Website: www.johndaviesburt.com
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