Peter Carey: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1963.
Peter Carey is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Price twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and The History of the Kelly Gang). An Australian, Carey spends a significant portion of the interview discussing colonialism and his approach to it within his work. I encourage reading this section yourself, if only for the insight it gives into thinking and writing with history in mind. It's not that Carey wants his writing called "historical fiction"--not at all, he feels it "addresses contemporary life." By attending to his colonial roots, however, Carey focuses on the new angles this gives his work:
Well, I'm a bloody colonial, aren't I? London is not my place and Britian is not my country. How was I going to have the authority to invent London in 1837? First I had to know something thats different from what anybody ever thought about the period. I couldn't steal from literature even if I wanted to -- for the most part metropolitan literature takes the place for granted. So I spent a lot of time reading about people visiting London from abroad. They're going to see things that would not occur to the Englishman. There was a German visitor to London, for instance, who spends all this time describing this weird English breakfast that turns out to the toast. That was terrific -- the familiar defamiliarized. I was trying to imagine -- what was it really like? We generally think of London in that period as gloomy and sooty and filthy, but in the New York Public Library I found an account by an American visitor who described London as ablaze with light. That's not how anyone thinks of that period, but if you came from Australia or America at that time it was bright. I thought, that's it -- this story [Jack Maggs] will start at night, and it will be blazing bright. That's the first way in which I can colonize London for myself, take imaginative possession of the territory.
Carey's interview is filled with observations of this kind. Carey's humor, too, fills the pages, such as when he describes the moment he thought he caught his big break:
The second novel was accepted by Geoffrey Dutton, who had a publishing house, Sun Books, in Australia. He wrote me a letter saying, This is fantastic, we love the character, we'd love to publish it. Imagine, I was twenty-four years old. I was about to leave Australia for the first time, so on my passport application, in the space where they ask your profession, I wrote author. Then I went to a meeting in Melbourne with Dutton and his partner. The partner spent all of the meeting looking for a spelling mistake he'd discovered on page three or four. And I slowly realized that they weren't going to publish it. They told me that the English publisher André Deutsch was in Australia looking for Australian novels, and that they'd given my novel to him.
I went to Europe, traveling for three months, arrived in London, found out where André Deutsch's offices were, presented myself at reception. Can I see Mr. Deutsch, please -- he brought my manuscript back from Australia, I believe. The receptionist said, Wait a second. She came back in fifteen minutes and gave me my manuscript and said, Thank you very much.
John Baldessari, "Art History," from Ingres and Other Parables, 1972.
As engaging as these issues and thoughts are, what most interested me about Carey's interview were the tactile images of his creative/writing process. There were times I felt I was reading about a visual artist at work, rather than about a writer -- and that shouldn't be surprising given the deep knowledge of the art world shown in Carey's Theft: A Love Story (2006). I would like to share these moments with you because they show the "sketchbook" moments of a writer's art. In a world taken over by word processing programs, it seems that the physical creation -- a messy process, indeed -- becomes invisible too often. I feel as if the interviewer, Radhika Jones, understands that this is special, for she makes special note of Carey's notebooks and describes them for the reader before the interview begins:
For his last few novels, he has had drafts bound into what he calls "working notebooks." The first one, made for The Kelly Gang, was "huge, heavy, and annoying to carry through the bush"; the more recent ones use lighter paper with wide margins for notes. The pages are rough ("I type so badly, it's appalling," he said), with passages highlighted to indicate where further research is necessary; the margins hold chapter plans and plot points, calendars and timelines, and occasionally pasted-in postcards -- anything relevant to the story in progress. Thought the notebooks speak to Carey's talents for weaving history and legend into his own richly invented words, they also illustrate his editorial rigor. "For a writer," he says, "the greatest thing is to be able to pare away."
Notably, his pasted-in/layered quality is an image that Carey creates in his discussion of writing in general. The interviewer asks about the line between fiction and nonfiction, mentioning that the characters from Theft are from Carey's hometown:
Yes. And then they go to Bellingen in northern New South Wales, where I also lived. But I'd warn against reading it in any autobiographical way. Think of it like Robert Rauschenberg picking up a sock from the floor and using it in a painting. It's still a sock, but it's no longer a sock. When I write I look at what's lying on the floor of my life. So I can pick up that river and that land and rip them up and glue them down to serve a whole new purpose.
Duane Michaels, Certain Words Must Be Said
And last, his answer to "how do you prepare for a book before you begin writing it" brings to my mind a range of images from Cornell's boxes to Haacke's and Baldessari's type-written cards next to images or even to how Duane Michael's images seem to run off in the spirit of the words scrawled around them....
Share on FacebookI recently found a photograph that was taken in the seventies when I was working on some failed movie script that gives an idea of what I do. In the pictures I'm using index cards and dividing up chapters and asking myself, What will happen in that chapter? I'll often look at those chapters as little boxes or rooms, and I'll start to ask myself what happens within each room. But I'll also be faking it by making notes and just wandering off into sentences to see where I end up.
