Key West Literary Seminar

Rachel Kushner

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, (more…)

Hilma Wolitzer

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.
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Thomas Mallon

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.

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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.
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Geraldine Brooks

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.

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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.” (more…)

Barry Unsworth

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.

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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.
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