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About the author
Meet Russell Banks
About the book
Excerpts from Russell Banks’s Diary
A Facsimile from the Working Manuscript of Continental Drift
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Have You Read?
More by Russell Banks
About the author
Meet Russell Banks
“Russell Banks has now become … the most important living white male American on the official literary map, a writer we, as readers and writers, can actually learn from, whose books help and urge us to change.”
—VILLAGE VOICE
RUSSELL BANKS was born in New Hampshire, in 1940, to a blue-collar family. His tumultuous relationship with his father led him to steal a car and briefly run away from home at age sixteen. He later enrolled in Colgate College on a full scholarship, the first in his family to attain higher education, but dropped out a few months later in a case of what he calls “turbulence.” He headed south, resolving to join Castro’s Cuban revolution. “It seemed like a noble thing to do. In the late 1950s we had very few political heroes, us young folk, us kids…. We could project romantic, altruistic, idealistic, political feelings onto [Castro and Che Guevara]. I was running off to try to make it real.” He hitchhiked as far as Florida, but soon ran out of money. “Then I’m moving furniture in a hotel and trying to survive, and pretty soon I forget about Castro.” Banks later ended up dressing mannequins at a Montgomery Ward department store.
By age nineteen he had married, and by twenty he had fathered a child. By age twenty, he was already divorced. Living in a trailer park in Florida in the 1960s, pumping gas and doing odd jobs, Banks, inspired by Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, first contemplated being a writer. “Writing isn’t one of those things, in a literate culture, like music or painting, where the gift is obvious at a young age. My obvious gift as a boy was in painting. I could draw well; I had the gift genetically. I didn’t know whether I had any particular writing talent at all. I set out to be a painter in my late teens and gradually discovered that I was writing, as one discovers one is breathing—and so you feel you must be alive! The discovery, the definition, came after the activity.” But his new identity didn’t come easily. “I was doing something that seemed a self-destructive kind of compulsion. Wanting to be a writer seemed to be a terrible waste of a life to my family and to me.” At a writers’ conference, he met migrant worker-turned-novelist Nelson Algren, who “gave me permission. He never told me how to write. But he said, ‘You can do it, kid, and it’s worth doing.’ ”
For a time, Banks returned to New Hampshire and followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps: he became a plumber. A few years later, he attended the University of North Carolina and graduated Phi Beta Kappa at age twenty-seven. He taught writing at the University of New Hampshire and had several short stories published in literary reviews, but it was not until age thirty-five that he published his first book, a story collection titled Searching for Survivors.
His pursuit of literature removed from Banks a nasty appetite for barroom brawls. “There are certain things that writing has done for me that if I hadn’t had them, I probably would have killed myself or somebody else,” he told Salon. “Some magazine was asking writers what they would have become if they hadn’t become a writer, and I said what would have happened to me is that I would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at twenty-four, or something like that. I really believe that, actually. I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don’t think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way. So I don’t think it worked as exorcism, or therapy, but I think it saved my life.”
“I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don t think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way.”
During his thirties, Banks developed a passionate interest in Jamaica. “I had been to the Caribbean, like most Americans who can swing it, a week here, a week there in the wintertime. I became deeply attracted to the culture, the people, and fell in love with the place.” When awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book, he took his family to Jamaica and stayed there a year and a half. He spent much of his time “up in the back country” of the island, absorbing the local traditions and idiom. Drawing on his experiences in both Jamaica and Florida, Banks next published Trailerpark, a collection of short stories, and The Book of Jamaica, a novel.
But it was not until the publication of his eighth book, Continental Drift, in 1985, that Banks first achieved critical success. The novel is the story of Bob Dubois, a burned-out oil-burner repairman from New Hampshire struggling to escape mediocrity, and Vanise Dorsinville, a refugee struggling to escape Haiti for the promised land of America, and the tragedy that ensues when they become involved in each other’s destiny. The novel’s title refers to the theory that the earth’s continents were once a united land mass that broke up and continues to drift slowly apart. Banks, however, is referring to demographic, not geologic, drifting, as people all over the world flee their homes in search of new lives. He is also describing the drift that occurs between human hearts, leaving an unbridgeable gap between husbands and wives, families and friends.
In order to capture a narrative voice capable of encompassing the disparate worlds of blue-collar New England and Caribbean voodoo, Banks invokes the Haitian loa, or mouth-man, the spirit of the dead that speaks through the mouth of the living, to help tell the story. “I’m really interested in reinventing the narrator. It’s a convention that went out the window in the twentieth century. I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ I’m like the ancient mariner stopping the wedding guest in his rush to tell this wonder to him. And I want to have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm-around-the-shoulder contact”. Continental Drift, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the John Dos Passos Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. James Atlas, writing in Atlantic Monthly, hailed the book as “a great American novel … a lesson in history…. It is the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America.”
Writing also helped Banks come to terms with his past. Though he made peace with his father before the older man’s death in 1979, the theme of troubled father-son relationships continues to play a large role in Banks’s novels. In Affliction, he explores the terrible legacy that an alcoholic and abusive father, Wade Whitehouse, has upon his son. “Writing Affliction, and dealing with Wade Whitehouse, gave me a kind of mercy and certainly forgiveness and understanding of my father that if I had just turned my back on him and walked away and acted bruised and hurt the rest of my life, I never would have obtained.”
In The Sweet Hereafter, Banks again explores the world of troubled blue-collar families. The novel takes as its central event the fatal crash of a school bus and the devastating effect it has on a small town’s emotional life. Banks was initially inspired by a newspaper clipping of a similar crash, as well as the tragic early death of his younger brother. The freight train his seventeen-year-old brother hopped onto was caught in a mudslide in Santa Barbara. “It was an inexplicable event. It was a mystery, finally.” The novel wrestles with issues of blame and causation in cases of accidents.
“I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’”
“In Rule of the Bone], Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.”
Rule of the Bone returns to the author’s twin obsession with Jamaica and dysfunctional American families. The novel
tells the story of a teenage misfit’s flight from an unhappy home in an upstate New York trailer park and the series of adventures he embarks upon until his final redemption in Jamaica. Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.
Buoyed by the success of these novels, as well as the film adaptations of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, Banks retired from teaching and gave up his professorship at Princeton. “A funny thing happened when I quit Princeton “he recalled in The Irish Times. “My attention shifted. I immediately forgot opinions I had on things like deconstruction. And I started noticing things like: ‘Why is the television set on in my neighbor’s house at five in the morning? Is that woman really unhappy? Or has the old man got drunk again and passed out?’ I sat in on a murder trial in the next town. I read the local paper instead of the TLS.”
Banks and his fourth wife, poet Chase Twichell, bought a second home in Keene, New York, not far from the abolitionist John Brown’s old farm. The move inspired his thirteenth novel, Cloudsplitter. Seven years in the making, Cloudsplitter is the story of the firebrand John Brown and the events leading to his disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, as told through the eyes of his son, Owen. Banks began thinking about his legendary neighbor and realized John Brown’s story has all the themes “I’ve been concerned with, some would say obsessed with, for twenty years—the relationships between parents and children, particularly fathers and sons, and the interconnections between politics and religion and race.”
His latest novel, The Darling (selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2004), is set in late twentieth-century Liberia. The work spans topics of civil and political upheaval, and strained loyalties to country and family.
The father of four daughters, Banks continues to write in a converted sugar shack just down the road from John Brown’s grave.
About the book
Excerpts from Russell Banks’s Diary
“I need to talk and drink with these guys, and the immigration guys, need to know the names of things.”
10/21/81
HOW ABSURD IS IT for me all at once to be thinking about a novel about refugees? Set in Haiti and southern Florida all about boats and the sea and human suffering and greed (what I’m really interested in is the couriers, the vultures who perform the necessary task of transporting the refugees—out of Haiti, Cuba, [illegible], Mexico).
Main character is American man in 40’s, a survivor on the edges of the respectable world who traffics in illegal aliens. Runs a charter boat out of Islamorada, lives in a trailer, is married, has two kids, has a drinking problem, has trouble dealing with sex, race violence. Yet knows what he is doing, has the large picture, which is what makes his trade legitimate. He’s an enzyme that connects two worlds, the Sunbelt USA and a backward Caribbean despotism—he lies between the fat Americans and the starving Haitians. His role is historical, he knows it, and it conflicts with his personal world when he faces being caught and has to destroy his human cargo to save himself.
I need a story here, a line along which my hero can change from a man unconscious of his tragic position to one conscious of it even though trapped by it. I need minor characters, I need the Haitian who corresponds to him, the guy in trade from the other side. I need to talk and drink with these guys, and the immigration guys, need to know the names of things.
These guys are like maggots or vultures—they turn one thing into another.
Locations—Miami & vicinity; Haiti; at sea.
Opens with the killing of the refugees off coast of Florida (off Palm Beach?). Then how my man got to this point, and what happens to him now. The main question, of course, is what happens to him, inside him, now? To answer that we have to know how he got here, his choices, if any. To destroy him is to destroy his historical usefulness, but to save him is to justify what? Murder?
Possible to write the scenes set at sea without traveling to Florida or Haiti. Research.
Through clippings and maps. Talk to a few people who know.
10/22/81
TRADER WOULD HAVE A HELPER, Haitian, who organized the group of refugees. At time of discovery at sea, the Haitian (a woman?) gets thrown off the boat with the others. Coast Guard picks her up with other survivors, she ends up in detention centers, etc.—so we get to see how refugees are treated—and trader tries to pursue her without exposing himself to danger. Why would he be so attached to her, except through guilt? Girlfriend, somehow?
10/23/81
GOOD TALK with C. last night re. The Trade (as I’ve come to think of its title)—very encouraging to me. As Bob Shure told me, Hawthorne and Pierce will wait, they’re already dead.
Thoughts of intercutting 20–30 page descriptions of the trade in Pakistan, SE Asia, central Europe, Africa, as the tale moves along. Same tone but more formalistic in approach.
Could I write 100 pages this winter—while doing a few stories, while researching the rest of the book, while relocating to NYC, while adjusting to new domestic circumstances, while attending to my kids …? Not to mention—while teaching at Columbia and Princeton. Seems impossible, but it will be, unless I make it a goal.
“Could I write 100 pages this winter—while doing a few stories, while researching the rest of the book, while relocating to NYC, while adjusting to new domestic circumstances, while attending to my kids …?”
Well—to Amherst, and K. Thank heaven we can see each other even this infrequently. I love loving her.
A Facsimile from the Working Manuscript of Continental Drift
Reprinted by permission of Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin
Have You Read?
More by Russell Banks
Read on
THE DARLING
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave’s story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he’s immediately placed in prison. Hannah’s encounter with Taylor in America ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah’s family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.
Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is a political/historical thriller—reminiscent of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad—that explodes the genre, raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures.
“In The Darling, [Banks] is working at full strength, and his readers are in his debt.”
—Washington Post Book World
THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF: THE STORIES OF RUSSELL BANKS
With The Angel on the Roof, Russell Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written. As is characteristic of all of Banks’s works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and the world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof affirms Russell Banks’s place as one of the masters of American storytelling.
“A beautifully lucid, frequently wrenching collection…. What elevates these stories far above their tacitly heartbreaking events are the vast reserves of compassion and wisdom that Mr. Banks brings to framing tragedy.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times
CLOUDSPLITTER
Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America’s most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of
unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it was like to be alive in that time.
Continental Drift Page 45
