Thomas Sanchez, Key West, 1980s.
Photo by Rollie McKenna This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Sanchez's Mile Zero. The epic novel unfolds in a richly imagined Key West where St. Cloud, Justo Tamarindo, Zobop, and El Finito are players in a late-twentieth century clash of generations, cultures, and beliefs. Hailed by The New York Times as "a comic masterpiece," it is, together with Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Thomas McGuane's Panama, a landmark in the literature of our island city.

In 1989, as Knopf was preparing the book for press, Sanchez agreed to an interview with George Murphy, a former local mayoral candidate and editor of the excellent anthology, The Key West Reader: The Best of Key West's Writers, 1830-1990. Over the course of several late nights at the now-legendary Full Moon Saloon, the following conversation took shape. In the interview, originally published in Island Life, Sanchez discusses the origins and development of Mile Zero, the parallels between Key West and Cannery Row, and the concept of contrabandista.


George Murphy: Thomas, you left the enormous California landscape of your first two books to live in and write about this tiny island. Why?

Thomas Sanchez: I had no intention of writing a novel in Key West when I first arrived there. I was on my way to another island in the Caribbean at the time; stopping in Key West was fortuitous. I had not been able to write fiction for four years. I did have several hundred pages of notes and sketches for a novel set in California and Mexico, but while writing both in California and Mexico, I was unable to match voices to my ideas. I had themes but no language. I was like a singer who has lost his voice, standing alone on a stage, mouthing empty clouds over the heads of a phantom audience.
      The first trip to Key West placed me at the confluence of several events, the first being the launching of the initial space shuttle, at the same time a boatload of Haitians fleeing the dictator Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier) came ashore in the Florida Keys, and another of the ubiquitous loads of cocaine confiscated by the Coast Guard from a fast boat attempting to make landfall near Key West. These three events forged in my mind a new American metaphor, one in the process of birth. The themes of the novel I had been carrying for four years coalesced into hard voices spoken in soft tongues in a fresh language. The illumination was simply that I had physically transported myself 3,000 miles across the continent into a geopolitical context of a transforming world. The key to unlocking that world necessitated undoing the cultural prejudice of my personal history. By that I mean the kind of "educated" American I had become, which had cost me for a time the ability to divine what is most crucial to a novelist, the character of the future which is reflected in the past.


Space Shuttle Columbia.
Photo by NASA GM:You have referred to Mile Zero as a cosmic Cannery Row. What do you mean by that?

TS: As a boy I lived at the edge of the real Cannery Row in California. It was still physically as Steinbeck had described it in his novel of the same name, as if his words had built a real place. But over time that place fell prey to the commerce of modernity. The old sardine packing houses were transformed into hotels and fancy boutiques, the ghostly quality disappeared beneath the thundering hordes searching for Steinbeck's people amongst an impossible charade. If you want to go to the real Cannery Row, you must go to Steinbeck's book; there is the life.
      When I arrived in Key West I discovered haunting parallels with Cannery Row, the old wharves where men once set off to shark, turtle, and sponge were still there. So were many of the great stone cigar factories built by the Cubans, all deserted, strangely quiet, but filled with ghostly consequence, and if you knew where to look you could make contact with those distant times; if you kept your ears open you could discover the voices of those still living who were part of those enterprises now thought of as dead. Cannery Row died when the sardines mysteriously disappeared, never to rise again.

Coast Guard cutter off Key West after intercepting
Haitian refugees, 1980. Photo by Dale McDonald.       Key West has died a thousand deaths, going from the richest city in America to the poorest. Key West died when the sponge blight came; it died when the wrecking laws were changed; it died when the turtles were all slaughtered; it died when slave auctions were abolished after the Civil War; it died when the Navy abandoned its massive base; it died after Prohibition made rum smuggling less than profitable; but each cycle was a tide washing away the old, bearing seeds of the new, changing the status quo. The tide was ceaseless, from clippership captains to freed Bahamian slaves, to Cubans escaping Spanish dictators or dictators of their own making, to modern-day southern hustlers and scammers on the lam from an unforgiving north. The future, when I arrived in Key West, was overhead in the space shuttle. The future was also a boatload of Haitian refugees.

GM: In the fictional vision of Mile Zero, Key West seems to become a character in the novel. Was this intentional?

TS: If no man is an island, then no island is a character. Mile Zero in the end is no more about Key West than Death in Venice is about Venice. Islands are about atmosphere, living at ease or at odds at all times with the elements, land, water, air, wind. Key West is the end of the American road, but also the beginning of the American dream. It is the beginning of America if you are a refugee who lands here. It is America's thrust in the new realities of the Caribbean Basin. The Spanish first called Key West the "island of bones" (Cayo Hueso) because it was littered with human bones bleached in the sun, bones of Indians left from lost battles with man and nature, bones of shipwrecked souls. For Cubans who emigrated in the last century, Key West was Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, filled with the bright promise of a future not ruled by a dictatorial past. The island is a human metaphor, but the reality is that at any moment a hurricane can wipe the slate clean. It is precisely this awareness that Mile Zero takes as its point of narrative departure.

GM: One of the major plots in Mile Zero involves an exotic Vodou-Santería murder, a crime which seems to haunt the conscience of Key West and has ramifications transcending the small island where the action is played out. The man who represents the conscience of the island is a majestic character, an Afro-Cuban-American cop, Justo Tamarindo. Was Justo, like MK, someone you knew existed before the novel was begun?


Marine Patrol officer with seized drugs,
Key West. (FL Div. Recreation & Parks) TS: No. Justo was a gift. Without Justo I never would have made it through Mile Zero. Justo appeared in the second chapter with such authority; he knew everything there was to know about Key West, about Cuba, about men and women, family and individual honor, spiritualism and the spirit. He is probably the most moral man I have met, in or out of a book. Justo just winked and promised, near ten years ago, when I was on the brink of all those pages thickening with action, "Follow me. I know the way out of here." And he did. I can say I often followed not knowing where he was leading, but I trusted and he was right. Justo Tamarindo taught me a great deal about life, and even though many early readers of the novel have made an identification between the character of St. Cloud and myself, for the obvious reasons of our similar backgrounds of political activism, it is Justo Tamarindo who inspired me. He became the very rock upon which the island of my novel was built.

Rachel Kushner writes frequently for Artforum and coedits the literary, philosophy, and art journal Soft Targets, whose focus is political inquiry, poetry, and literature-in-translation. Her debut novel, Telex From Cuba, was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award.

Telex from Cuba takes place in Oriente Province and Havana, Cuba, during the 1950s. We learn about the American businessmen in charge of the country's sugar and nickel mining operations, and the Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians who work in the mines and cut the cane in a form of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, from their base in the mountains above the sugar and nickel operations in Preston and Nicaro, Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army battle the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose surrender on New Year's Day fifty years ago introduced hope to the Cuban underclass and fear to the businessmen who relied on their cheap labor.

Kushner will join us for the second session of the 27th annual Key West Literary Seminar, January 15-18, in the theater of the historic San Carlos Institute, which stands today as a museum to an earlier Cuban revolutionary, José Martí. In this final interview of our 2008 series, conducted by email over the holiday season, Kushner talks about the experiences of her mother's family living in Cuba, the real Christian de La Mazière, and the process of creating fiction from the Cuban revolution.


Littoral: From the book jacket, we know Telex From Cuba is based in part on your mother's experiences as a child in Oriente, on land owned by the United Fruit Company. How much of the book is family history? Are there characters that are closely based on your mother's family, and the people they knew?

Rachel Kushner: The original spark, my idea to write the book, was due to the fact that my mother had lived in Cuba as a child, and I'd gone there with her and two of her sisters to see the strange, former American colony in northeastern Oriente Province where they'd spent part of their childhood. The historical circumstances upon which I attempted to build my novel– an American colony in Cuba, and the various roles the people who lived there played in the revolution– was a fictional schematic that I borrowed from real life, the lives of my mother's family and the people they knew and that I discovered, independently, through my own research. I did, at least initially, draw heavily from the mountains of archival material my grandparents had left behind: every letter they'd written from Cuba had a carbon, they saved every calling card and receipt and budget book and party invitation– I mean everything– so I had access to this very rich archive of the lives of the Americans who managed and controlled Cuba's sugar and nickel– the country's most valuable resources. But the novel itself is a work of fiction. I am a fiction writer, not a memoirist, not a historian. As a literary figuration, it is ruled by the imagination, and structured by it, too. If the book were simply a fictionalization of my family's history, it would have been a rather dreary exercise– not because their lives were in any way dreary, but because fiction has to rise up organically and reconfigure the past on its own terms, via a logic that's aesthetic, not factual. I learned this the hard way. At first, I was rather attached to some of the details I found in my (long-deceased) grandparents trove. But those details so often caused problems. They weren't invented, and so they lacked the suppleness of context. The invented detail fits with the mind's own contextual logic. The "real" detail, by contrast, is often so much less believable. Much of what creates "my" Oriente Province is a synthesis, a false reality I was only able to generate after sifting through the details of the real place.
    Overall, the proposition of Americans of various sorts leaving the States to live in a colonial outpost, running away to become more themselves, or get their share of what they think they deserve, and the tacit race and social hierarchies they encounter, and comprise, is a proposition I worked out after having thought a great deal about my own grandparents' lives. So in that sense the whole project is subtended, or ghosted, by the experiences of my family. But as I said– fiction is fiction, and not "about" any real person's life. And because of the mysterious process of writing fiction, and its special integrity, I wince a little when people describe my novel as "based on." Publishers rely so heavily on back-story to promote novels these days– because they think it sells, and maybe it does– but novels don't simply enact the real as it took place. They do something else, stranger and more complicated.

L: Where did your mother's family go after the revolution? Did they ever return? Did you grow up with an awareness of Cuba and Castro, or did this come later?

RK: My family actually left before the revolution. I think my grandfather was fired. He was very disappointed to leave Cuba. My grandmother, far more closed-minded, was happy to leave the "natives" and their lack of love for iceberg lettuce and proper English. The episode in my book of the Americans who get rescued by aircraft carrier because the town is being strafed by Batista's military planes is drawn from a situation that really occurred in Nicaro, but my own family was not there for it. They ended up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after having first moved back in with their own parents, in St. Louis. They had to split up their children because my grandfather was unemployed. Although this occurred before the Cuban revolution that ejected the Americans from Nicaro, the predicament is in some sense the same: having escaped the US only to wind up returning, jobless and on some level estranged.
    After my grandfather regained his footing, got a job and re-established a life in Tennessee, I know that he was very amused by Castro. He saved all kinds of clippings from the early sixties, and paid attention. He'd spent his time there, of course, and he was not surprised by the comeuppance– especially because Nicaro played a particular role in the whole thing. The rebels were right above Nicaro, and Fidel later railed against the Americans for owning and controlling Cuba's incredibly valuable nickel mines.
    My mother and aunts are all quite far to the left, politically, which is unusual for Americans who lived in Cuba, but for them, it is that experience that politicized them. I had heard about Cuba my whole life, my mother always cooked Cuban dishes, played Cuban music, talked about her childhood as this wonderfully free time in her life. I went with them to Cuba, for the first time, in 2000, which is when I started writing the book. They were the only ones of the Americans who had lived in Preston and Nicaro ever to go back to the United Fruit and nickel enclaves, respectively. Most of the people who lived there were unsympathetic to the revolution and had no desire to see what became of their once-elegant world, the sovietization, the pollution, the shabby state of their country club and manager's row. But my mother and her sisters still feel very connected to the place. Quite simply, they're rather pro-Fidel, because the people they saw working in the canefields and the nickel mines and as servants in their parents' homes have all benefited from the revolution. Obviously this is a sticky issue, and not everyone feels this way, but my mother and her sisters lived there, and I respect the context in which they have made their political judgments. As a student of Latin American politics, my awareness of Fidel, growing up, was that he was the first Latin American leader to stand up to the U.S., and as a child, this impressed me greatly, lack of political freedoms and embargo-related privations notwithstanding.

L: How much time did you spend in Cuba? Where? How did you get around the travel ban?

RK: I spent about two months there, all told. Mostly in Nicaro, which is in the Nipe Bay region. But also Havana, Santiago, Holguín and that whole province: Preston and Banes, the two United Fruit towns; Moa, the other nickel-processing town; Birán, where Fidel grew up. Professional researchers may travel legally under a general US Treasury License, a far easier way to go. I flew direct from Miami.

L: Your Christian de La Mazière is a real villain– an execution instructor and a double-dealer involved simultaneously with the Castros, Batista, and Prío, as well as the notorious dictators of neighboring Hispaniola, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What is known about the real La Mazière? What made him appealing as a character?

RK: I'm so glad you asked about La Mazière, who takes up a good portion of my book, and is the character whose interiority is most exposed to the reader, and yet so often my novel has been described as being told by the two young Americans, as if the French Nazi were this curious blind spot. To me, he is very much at the center of things. While I'm amused that you call him a villain, as the designation is an acknowledgment of his affective role, I don't quite see him that way myself.
    At one point Everly has a kind of musing on her little sister's amorality and the difference between that and immorality, and in a way it echoes La Mazière (although perhaps the distinction would be his own– that he is not in opposition to morals but outside of them). In fact, you're probably right that he is a scoundrel. Certainly the "real" La Mazière, upon who my character is based, is very much of a scoundrel. He was an aristocrat who wrote for a fascist newspaper during the war and then, in August of 1944, just before the allies rolled into Paris, he fled east and enlisted in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS.

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels including, most recently, The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading; and a book on the craft of fiction titled The Company of Writers. She has taught writing workshops at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and right here at the Key West Literary Seminar. She will return to Key West and the Seminar for a third time this January, as a moderator for our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, and as a faculty member in our writers' workshop program. In a telephone conversation yesterday, we learned what to expect from Wolitzer's workshop, and gathered some tips about how to assess the quality of a manuscript.


Littoral: How would you explain your approach to teaching a writers' workshop?

Hilma Wolitzer: I was in my 30s when I took my first workshop, at the New School with Anatole Broyard. The very first thing I ever heard about my work, the first comment in the class, was "That's the most boring thing I ever heard." Broyard stepped in and said "I don't see how your comments are useful to the writer. You have to say why you were bored, and what you would do to make it less boring." In that moment, I learned how to teach.
    Honesty and charity have to prevail. You have to ask questions of the manuscript: Do I believe this? Do I care? Am I compelled to keep reading? I encourage everybody to comment on everybody's work; and I ask the person who wrote the manuscript to not defend his or her work against criticism until everyone has spoken. It's not exactly a courtroom, but certain evidence comes out– if 10 people say they don't believe in a character, this is evidence against the manuscript. On the other hand, writers are not always aware of what they do well. If you can point out one good sentence in an otherwise not-so-good manuscript, that's very helpful to a writer.

L: Are there good books about how to write?

HW: More helpful than reading how-to-write books is reading well-written books. Right now, I'm reading a book that I'm crazy about– a contemporary novel called Old Filth by a British writer named Jane Gardam. I almost want to force this book on writers. David Nasaw is another writer I greatly admire. He's compelled to be truthful– it's part of his ethic– and he's a wonderfully lively and engaging writer. William Kennedy is a splendid writer; his novel Ironweed is a book that can teach anybody about writing and about invention and about language. Good writing conveys certain essential truths about how we live with one another; and that's what we're trying to achieve in this workshop- to make writing of quality not just better, but, as Grace Paley said, "truer."

L: What does a Key West Literary Seminar writers' workshop feel like?

HW: It begins as a group of strangers, like a pickup basketball game in a schoolyard, and people learn how to play as a team. Now it's not a contest– we're not trying to find the best writer; no one's going to win. If your manuscript becomes better, then everyone wins. These people come together and they talk about something quite intimate– their work– and they get to know each other very well in a very short period of time. I find that people generally are really supportive of one another and not competitive. After all, the aim of the workshop is revision, not suicide.

L: Are you ever too old to start writing?

HW: No! I was in my mid-40s when my first book was published. I encourage people to start writing at any age– you don't have to have great legs like an athlete or a dancer. You just sit at your typewriter or your computer in your pajamas and you're invisible. Only the work becomes visible.

Thomas Mallon is a novelist, essayist, critic, and former literary editor at GQ. He has received the Ingram Merrill Award for outstanding work as a writer, and is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. As the author of historical novels including Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and Dewey Defeats Truman, Mallon is known for richly imagined characters and situations set within crucial moments in United States history. As a critic, he regularly writes about new works of historical fiction; and a collection of his essays, In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing, includes two important pieces on the genre, "Writing Historical Fiction" and "The Historical Novelist's Burden of Truth."

Mallon's most recent novel is Fellow Travelers, an account of a Washington D.C. love affair between Hawkins Fuller, a handsome State Department official, and young Timothy Laughlin, a fervent anti-communist and Senate staffer. Through Laughlin and Fuller, we witness the so-called lavender scare of the 1950s, in which State Department employees suspected of homosexuality were fired as security risks; and are given a ringside seat for the sordid endgame of the Army-McCarthy hearings run by notorious Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Thomas Mallon talks about Fellow Travelers, the rumors of Senator McCarthy's own homosexuality, the Obama-McCain election; and the current state of historical fiction, including works by Gore Vidal and William Kennedy, both of whom will join Mallon in January 2009 during our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.


Littoral: Are Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin based on real people in any way? Why did you choose to cast these characters in a well-documented era in Washington?

Thomas Mallon: Fuller and Laughlin aren't based on any particular historical figures. Both contain bits and pieces of people I've known in my own life, which makes them like the characters one finds being created by just about any novelist of the "non-historical" sort.
    In this regard, though, one thing in particular interested me about Laughlin. When I started to make notes on him, the first thing I put down was "Date of birth: November 2, 1931"– exactly twenty years earlier than mine. I realized that in some ways I was going to be writing about what my own life might have been like had I been born two decades earlier.

    As for putting him and Fuller into this well-documented era: in this respect, they fit in with a lot of the people in my novels– minor figures, invented or real (take Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, from Henry and Clara), who get caught up in major historical dramas. The roles that Fuller and Laughlin play in actual events are sufficiently small that I don't think their presence on the scene disconcerts well-informed students of the period, the kind of readers who actually know, say, Charles Potter and the other members of the McCarthy committee. Even to such readers the presence of a staffer like Tim would seem believable.
    In any case, this has become my preferred avenue into history– the plausible presence of a small person who's seeing big things.

L: How is Fellow Travelers different from your other work? Are the rumors of McCarthy's homosexuality given more credence in your novel than in the historical record?

TM: Fellow Travelers is different mostly, I guess, in terms of subject matter. (The basic method and techniques are pretty much the same.) My novels had often contained a lot of politics, but homosexuality hadn't before this one been more than a leitmotif (a couple of minor characters, like Frank Sherwood in Dewey Defeats Truman).
    As for the McCarthy rumors: I suppose my book does give them more credence– or at least attention– than the historical record does, but there were certainly whisperings at the time about gay experiences McCarthy may have had from Wisconsin to the Wardman Park Hotel. His rather sudden marriage in middle age struck his detractors as suspicious.

    It's often been suggested that Roy Cohn had some sort of hold of McCarthy, whereas Fellow Travelers invents a situation in which it's David Schine who has something on the senator. I don't, of course, know the true nature of McCarthy's sexuality. In the novel I portray him as somebody with a sloppy libido that's governed by alcohol. He's mostly homosexual but likely to grope anyone when he's had too much to drink.

Australian-born writer Geraldine Brooks is the author, most recently, of People of the Book (2008), a novel about the stories uncovered during the conservation of the sacred Hebrew text known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. Her previous novel, March (2005), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As a journalist for The Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and '90s, she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Her husband of twenty-four years is fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Horwitz. Both Brooks and Horwitz will join us in January 2009 for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Brooks will deliver the keynote address to open our first session.

Our conversation with Brooks begins with March, which tells the story of Captain March, known to readers of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as the character of the father and husband who has left the family to fight in the Civil War. Brooks based her Captain March upon Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's real-life father, whose surviving letters and diaries reveal a close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The fictional character of Captain March therefore develops alongside two founding myths of American history- the abolitionist cause during the Civil War and the intellectual currents of Concord, Massachusetts- while also providing an imagined backstory to a classic of American literature. The literary risks of such an imaginative weaving of truth and fiction are great. The reward of the Pulitzer, America's top literary honor, rarely given to a foreign-born writer, is proof of her exceptional talent. Brooks talks about this book and her love for books; about Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone; the "Tony Test," reading in the bath, and ordinary, everyday Geraldine.


Littoral: When you had finished with March, did you imagine it would meet with such success?

Geraldine Brooks: Of course not! You'd have to be delusional.

L: How did you feel about it, in that interim before public reception?

GB: I think with any book, there's an odd period when you've had to let it go. You've pushed the deadline and your editor's patience to the end, and you have to stop revising and tinkering. Then, alarmingly, it's out of your hands. There's a kind of nervous uncertainty: could I have done better? Will someone, anyone, want to read it?

L: In an interview with Dave Weich, you said, "As a reporter, if you don't know the truth, you can't write it, but in fiction you can make it up." I think that "make it up" part bothers some readers of historical fiction. Have readers been duped, who believe they know the history better after reading historical fiction? How does historical fiction contribute to our understanding of history?

GB: It's nothing to do with duping. It is the novelist's job to imagine, and my implicit contract with the reader is clear enough: This is a novel; I hope you enjoy the fruits of my imagination. I think if you call it a novel, you can do what you like, but you need to explain later what it is that you did. I believe the least one can do is offer an afterword, setting out where the facts end and the fiction takes over.
    Through the vehicle of story, I think it is possible to lead reluctant minds to consider our earlier selves. People who would not pick up a narrative history book will perhaps pick up a novel and find their interest engaged by predicaments from the past. I really believe in following the line of fact as far as it leads, to make a good strong scaffolding for the imaginative enterprise. Then, when you come to the place where that line of fact frays and disappears, I let imagination take over.

L: Your husband is a fellow Pulitzer-winner, and is also an author of a well-received book on the Civil War. We're looking forward to having you here together in January. To what extent do your literary interests and convictions overlap? To what extent do they differ?

GB: We started out as newspaper reporters together, united in the service of fact. Tony continues to write factual books; he says I've "gone over to the dark side," as he puts it, "making stuff up." He's an enthusiastic reader of fiction, though, so that makes him a great first reader for me. He's very impatient– if a novel doesn't grab him he won't keep reading. That's helpful to me: to see if my early drafts can pass the "Tony Test." During our long marriage, we seem to have managed to drag each other towards our respective interests. He brought me around on the Civil War; I turned him on to the wonders of international travel.

L: As a writer married to a writer, do you always think of yourself as a writer? Or is there still another self, an ordinary, everyday Geraldine?

GB: There's definitely Schlepper Geraldine. And, to be honest, she's a much more important person in the world than Writer Geraldine. If I stopped writing today, it would be years before anyone noticed. If I stop taking out the trash, feeding the dogs, and picking up the groceries, the howls of protest would be almost instantaneous.

L: I admire that sentiment very much. But, don't you hope for a lasting literary reputation? Did your career as a journalist inure you to good writing and hard work being taken out with the trash?

GB: I hope people will read and enjoy my books, that's it. Really. Anything else is just delectable gravy.

Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in Durham, England. He is the author of fifteen published novels and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Three of his books– Pascali's Island (1980), Morality Play (1995), and Sacred Hunger (1992)– were shortlisted for Britain's premier literary honor, the Man Booker Prize; Sacred Hunger won the Booker in 1993. Unsworth's sixteenth book, Land of Marvels, a historical novel set in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I, will be published in January, 2009. He will deliver the John Hersey Memorial Address at the Seminar on January 15. Unsworth lives today in rural Italy with Aira, his wife. In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Barry Unsworth talks about the effects of expatriate life, of aging, and the role historical fiction plays in understanding our past and our present.


Littoral: What are you working on now?

Barry Unsworth: I have a new novel in mind, but I haven't started seriously working on it yet. I am at that very early– and very pleasant– stage, when the idea is exciting and the sense of potential very great, and there is none of that feeling of inadequacy that will come with the attempt to put the words down, an inadequacy in oneself and in the resources of language, experienced every time and always forgotten again. The novel will be set in contemporary Rome and will try to deal with some of the masks and mythologies of that extraordinary city in the course of its long life, and with the fortunes of a cosmopolitan group of Roman residents.
       I have lived here in rural Italy for the last 16 years. It has affected me in certain ways– affected the way I write and what I write about, and the way I view the world. A beautiful country and likeable, highly gifted people, betrayed by their own history of disunity and the weakness of state institutions. Corruption, the abuse of power, intricate connections between politics, business and organized crime– I suppose you find these things everywhere, but you find them here in spectacular fashion.

L: As a novelist, you've often chosen historical settings over contemporary ones. Why do you choose to write historical fiction?

BU: I don't think it has been so much a choice as a sort of gradual process determined by accidents of circumstance– like many things in life, I suppose. I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn. The seed was there, I think, but I didn't start writing historical fiction until much later. Pascali's Island (1980), which was my sixth novel, was the first to be set in the past.
      Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there– the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman's phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition– then and now– which transcend the particular period and become timeless.

L: I'm curious about your relationship to language. Spoken language, of course, is mostly absent from the historical record. As an expatriate, I would think that you are daily obliged to speak a language not your own. Two questions, then: What is involved in recreating the idioms in which your historical characters speak? And, how has living in Italy affected your relationship to English?

BU: As you say, it's rare to find examples of direct speech in the documents of the past. You can find speech patterns in the literature of some former periods- Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for example, the 18th-century novel, even in medieval love lyrics or drinking songs. And journals can be helpful, being often written in a more intimate and colloquial style.
      If you go back far enough, or if the characters have become legendary, it ceases to matter; Achilles or Caligula or Robin Hood can speak in more or less any way you choose. I think the problem arises when you want to be true to the period and at the same time comprehensible to the reader. You can't make your characters speak in the language and idiom of their own time if the language of the period would seem archaic. It would put too much strain on the understanding and would seem false in any case. There might be various ways of dealing with this, but I have generally found it sufficient to avoid anachronism and contracted verbal forms. If the novel is set in the 14th century, for example, you wouldn't make one character say to another, "You look great in that dress," or "Let's get on with the job." The extra degree of formality that results from avoiding such blunders does not, in my opinion, inhibit the writer's powers of expression or stultify his or her prose, in fact it can stimulate invention.
      How my relationship to English has been affected by living away from the country is difficult to know; it would be a slow and probably imperceptible process, a sort of linguistic decay, which one would hardly be aware of from day to day. My style has grown terser and sparer, less exuberantly metaphorical, less joyous in a way. But that may well be due to the sobering effect of the years. Anyway, as I draw nearer to 80, I like to interpret it that way.

Thomas McGuane, Tennessee Williams, and James Kirkwood at the wrap-party for the film adaptation of McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade, ca. 1975, at Louie's Backyard in Key West.

Thomas McGuane's Key West novels— Ninety-two in the Shade and Panama —are in a class of their own. They portray the volatile Key West of the 1970s, when a legion of do-it-yourself drug smugglers thrived and cocaine was plentiful, cheap, and, more or less, socially acceptable. McGuane's heroes, Thomas Skelton and Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, chart that Key West with intelligence and recklessness, lust and candor, violence and acute observation. Since Hemingway in To Have and Have Not, no one has rendered the feel of the streets, shores, and waters of Key West so well as McGuane did in Panama.To read it today, thirty years after its publication, is to hear the bones of that not-so-distant place creaking beneath today's clean veneer, to ghost-walk from lunch at La Lechonera to a fishing trip at the Cay Sal Bank, to watch kids playing at Astro City, to drink at the Full Moon Saloon, and to walk cross-town again and again in the mid-day sun from an overgrown Casa Marina to the oyster-shell paved parking lots between Caroline St. and the Gulf.

McGuane sold his Key West home in the early 1980s. He returned often to visit friends, and even joined our honorary board of directors. In 1984, he sat down with longtime KWLS board member, Liz Lear, for a conversation in the home of Bill Wright, also a former board member. They talk about Key West and why he left, about the threat of nuclear annihilation and the ocean, about writing, about writers, and about dogs. Originally published in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 36/2 (1986). Reprinted in Conversations with Thomas McGuane, edited by Beef Torrey, University Press of Mississippi (2007). Reprinted here with permission from Liz Lear.

A Conversation with Thomas McGuane
Liz Lear / 1984

This conversation took place in a house in Key West that McGuane had rented from fellow writer Bill Wright. It was a warm tropical night in March of 1984. We sat around a dining room table piled high with books and the just completed manuscript of Something to Be Desired. Through the open French doors a lighted pool glimmered and the soft breeze carried the floral scent of something nameless but sweet. From an adjacent room, the clear young inquiring voice of McGuane's daughter Anne occasionally interrupted the story being read to her.

LL: I have always been intrigued with what attracts creative people to certain places. I wonder what or who brought them here and what makes them stay. Why are you in Key West?
TM: I first came to Key West as a boy with my father to go fishing. When I decided to come back here as an adult, it was because I associated the island with writers, reading, and writing.
    American writers love exotic atmospheres, and yet really don't want to live outside of the country. Key West is one of those places that allow them to have it both ways. It's a southerly town without the burden of southern history. It's intrinsically a nice place. I enjoy the ambience of a place where Spanish is spoken. I like that fecund smell the island has. I love to be out on the ocean: for better or worse, I'm still a sportsman and the ocean is one of the last frontiers where we can live in a civilized way next to that great wilderness.

LL: Did you always want to be a writer? When did you start?
TM: Yes. I always wanted to be a writer and I began when I was ten— at least to try.

LL: Did you ever do any other work?
TM: I never really made a living, of course. I worked as a boy and young man at odd jobs, the same kind of thing other kids did. I worked at a gas station. I worked as a cowboy— cowboy is too big a word for it: I worked on a ranch in an unskilled way. Then I went off to school and was just hell-bent to write, to read and write, and that's it.

As a book reviewer for National Public Radio for more than a quarter-century, Alan Cheuse has been called "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio." Cheuse is also the author of several novels, a memoir, two short story collections, and a collection of essays on reading and writing. He last joined the Literary Seminar in 2003, and will return this January as a panelist and writers' workshop instructor when we explore Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Cheuse's forthcoming book, To Catch the Lightning, is a historical novel about photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) and his struggle to complete "The North American Indian," his epic project of photographing all of the native tribes of the western United States. I had a chance to talk with Cheuse recently, about NPR, Curtis, and the role novelists have in the writing of history.

Littoral: Why did you choose to write about Curtis? And why did you write it as a novel?

Alan Cheuse: I first encountered Curtis's photographs of the American Indian while I was in college. In fact I remember the first time I saw them. The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a great old rerun house, mounted an exhibition of them in the lobby in the late nineteen fifties. That was the first time I saw Curtis's work. I have long forgotten what movie I saw that evening in Cambridge, but I never forgot the faces and tones and settings of those portraits.

My research led me to Curtis the historical figure– photographer, self-made ethnographer, naive entrepreneur, difficult husband, and, through it all, devoted father. My novel, I hope, knits this all together in an inventive, forward-moving, uniquely presented way, giving especially the feel of his life, which narrative by historians doesn't usually do. Which is to say, historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction. I don't mean to pick a fight with historians here, but this is the way I see it. I suppose some of them might see a novelist waltzing through the field, picking up forget-me-nots and knotting them into a necklace and calling it history. But I'm not calling my novel history. I'm calling it a novel. I've written a novel about American journalist John Reed, and about an American woman painter based mostly on the life of Georgia O'Keeffe. The Curtis novel forms, at least in my own mind, the third in a kind of triptych about American artists, larger than life, but, I hope, still alive in our imaginations.

L: As I understand it, Curtis' photographic negatives were awarded to his ex-wife Clara in the divorce settlement. Rather than see this transaction through, he destroyed them. Was the relationship between Curtis' professional and personal lives always so fraught?

AC: There's a scene in the novel in which Curtis and his daughter Beth (she took Curtis's side in the quarrel) and a few friends have a destroy the negatives party. Like most artists he found it difficult to draw a line between his professional life and personal life. He gave thirty years of his adult life to the project, but he was in spite of everything devoted to his family. Early on it was easier than later, when he became the Curtis history knows (who was the Curtis who knew history and its effects). He tried heartily to keep his family intact, but he couldn't. He tried to be a good man– as his oldest child and only son said toward the end of the photographer's life, "he was the best man I knew."

Kristen-Paige Madonia, the winner of our inaugural Marianne Russo Scholarship, and a speaker during this year's New Voices Seminar, has been selected by The Studios of Key West as their very first visiting literary artist. She'll be staying in TSKW's "Mango Tree House" for one month beginning in October, just in time for Fantasy Fest and, if she's lucky, the tail end of the season for the mammoth mango trees on TSKW's compound. I had a chance to talk with Kristen-Paige about her plans yesterday:

Arlo: What will you be working on during your residency at The Studios of Key West?

Kristen-Paige Madonia: I plan to work on my second novel. It's about a sixteen-year old embarking on a cross-country trip from West Virginia to San Francisco. This trip is prompted by the discovery that she is pregnant, and by her on-going ambition to locate her paternal father, whom she has never met. My intention with this project is to give voice to a character exploring the transition between childhood and adulthood.

A: Didn't you move from Virginia to the west coast? What role does your own life play in this novel?

KPM: Well, yes, I've made that cross-country trip too many times to count, but this novel isn't only about the physical trip from one side of the US to the other, it's also about the psychological journey of my character. It seems it is becoming more typical for people to move more frequently, whether it be an attempt at self-reinvention or a general anxiousness in society, so I'm trying to explore themes of rootlessness and restlessness in addition to the ever-changing definition of the "modern American family."