Where Characters Come From: Morrison, Munro, & Carey (The Paris Review Interviews)
Peter Carey
Being around writers is a lot like being around photographers. While I'm more interested in photographing gardens and architecture, I'll direct my camera at friends whenever its at hand. It's my prerogative. Right?
Similarly, I know I'm possibly (no, I know I am) being recorded for a writer's use down the road. I talk directly about it -- I don't want misunderstandings. What I don't want to happen. What I'll allow (cue laughter). This is the risk we take in having writers (or photographers) as our intimates or our enemies. At any moment, we become the object of someone else's vision.
How a writer approaches this issue is a reoccurring topic in The Paris Review Interviews. I am sure to come back to this subject as I proceed through the volumes, but I open it up with these three writers.
Toni Morrison's response is the most categorical and it sets the stakes:
Morrison: I never use anyone I know. In The Bluest Eye, I think I used some gestures and dialogue of my mother in certain places, and a little geography. I've never done that since. I really am very conscientious about that. It's never based on anyone. I don't do what many writers do.
Interviewer: Why is that?
Morrison: There is this feeling that artists have -- photographers, more than other people, and writers -- that they are acting like a succubus . . . this process of taking from something that's alive and using it for one's own purposes. You can do it with trees, butterflies, or human beings. Making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people's lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.
In fiction, I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. That's part of the excitement. If they're based on somebody else, in a funny way it's an infringement of a copyright. That person owns his life, has a patent on it. It shouldn't be available for fiction.
As indicated in Morrison's quote (but perhaps obscured) is that she avoids using even geography that she intimately knows. We know from the quotes in Monday's post that Peter Carey does draw from the geography of his past, although he emphasizes the pasted-up, artistic transformation of life a-la Robert Rauschenberg's throw it on the canvas. About drawing directly from people he knows, he discusses the time when he published a memoir piece on his first wife's abortion:
Carey: I'd had that story in my head for twenty-five years. In retrospect I think I shouldn't have written it. The thing I didn't think about was that it would also be published in Australia, and my first wife had a life there and I couldn't protect her privacy. She was terrifically generous about it, but I think I had presumed a right that I didn't really have. That's a sort of arrogance and self-involvement of writers that's not very attractive.
Interviewer: What was the reaction to it here?
Carey: When it appeared, I couldn't walk five yards in my neighborhood without someone coming up to me and saying, God that must have been so painful to write. Well, the curious thing about it was that it was easy to write. It was easy to write because I didn't need to make it up -- it had been in my head all that time. I can think of things that were way more painful to write that I've made up.
Alice Munro, 1993
Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer and novelist (Open Secrets and Lives of Girls and Women), discusses freely that the people and places of her childhood and adulthood are transformed into her narratives. Indeed, being part of a story can be a prize at auction:
The nurse [of "Friend of My Youth"] I invented, but I was given the name. We had a fundraising event at the Blyth Theater, about ten miles away from here. Everybody contributed something to be auctioned off to raise money, and somebody came up with the idea that I could auction off the right to have the successful bidder's name used for a character in my next story. A woman from Toronto paid four hundred dollars to be a character. Her name was Audrey Atkinson. I suddenly thought, That's the nurse! I never heard from her. I hope she didn't mind.
Munro regularly returns to her mother to enter "character," but friends and acquaintances are equally fertile ground. First, the origin of "Friend of My Youth":
There is a young man I know who works in the library in Goderich and researches things for me. He was at our house one night and he began to talk about neighbors of his family, neighbors who lived on the next farm. They belonged to religion that forbade them to play card games, and so they played Cronkinole, which is a board game. He just told me about that, and then I asked him about the family, their religion, what they were like. He described these people and then told me about the marriage scandal: the young man who comes along who is a member of their church and gets engaged to the other daughter. Then, low and behold, the younger sister was pregnant so the marriage has to be switched. And they go on all living together in the same house. The stuff about fixing the house, painting it over is all true too. The couple painted their half, and the older sister didn't -- half the house got painted.
Then, the origin of "Thanks for the Ride":
Interviewer: In "Thanks for the Ride," you write from the point of view of a rather callous city boy who picks up a poor town girl for the night and sleeps with her and is alternately attracted to and revolted by the poverty of her life. It seems striking that this story came from a time when your life was so settled and proper.
A friend of my husband's came to visit us the summer when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter. He stayed for a month or so. He worked for the National Film Board, and he was doing a film up there. He told us a lot of stuff -- we just talked the way you do, anecdotally about our lives. He told the story about beign in a small town on Georgian Bay and going out with a local girl. It was the encounter of a middle-class boy with something that was familiar to me but not familiar to him. So I immediately identified strongly with the girl and her family and her situation, and I guess I wrote the story fairly soon afterward because my baby was looking at me from the crib.
The interview contains similar anecdotes, but the underlying point is that Munro, in contrast with Morrison and perhaps going further than Carey's art/life collage metaphor, sees the people and places of her life as legitimate fodder for narrative. This philosophy comes through here -- although with a catch:
Share on FacebookI'm doing less personal writing now [1994] than I used to for a very simple obvious reason. You use up your childhood, unless you're able, like William Maxwell, to keep going back and finding wonderful new levels in it. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home. Maybe it's advisable to move on to writing those stories that are more observation.
