Continental Drift (57 page)

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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“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.”

—V
ILLAGE
V
OICE

R
USSELL
B
ANKS
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.”

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.

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.

10/21/81

H
OW 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

T
RADER 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

G
OOD 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.