RUSSELL BANKS – A LIFE IN LETTERS, Edited and Compiled by Victor Forbes

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RUSSELL BANKS • 1940-2023 “I write against evil.”

“Russell Banks was a writer of consequence. He also was a major human being. His books have changed the minds of people who change the world, which was his purpose in writing them. He was a writer of force and deliberation, and his work stands as an article of faith in the significance of literature. To paraphrase Alex Haley, when Russell died, it was like the burning of a library. That his voice is now silent is beyond sadness.”

– William Kennedy “While the country notes it has lost one of its great writers, most of us living here in Keene feel deeply the loss of a friend; A genuine, generous, encouraging, vibrant and yes, amazingly talented friend. He will be missed.

My deepest heartfelt sympathies to Chase, his family and loved ones. May his memory be bright.”

– Aline Pepe “There are always times in our lives when we all feel ‘Disconnected’ from some thing or someone … emotionally, physically, spiritually, or any of the above…but the important thing is to never give up hope and strive to find a way to pull it all back together.”

– John Oates

By JAMIE ELLIN FORBES, Publisher “The Grandmaster” Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, from early – Edward childhood Jeff has been interested in discovering and learning about Bear Miller

JEFF VERMEEREN

“Hero Of Creativity”

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ree of earthly affliction, tickethe punched to the taking sweet hereafter, anything and everything.

As his a youth was always things the mighty voice and deep roots of Russell Banks are gone, bequeathing a profound emptiness to those who knew and loved himheand to millions more who loved him without knowing him. Yet he leaves apart and creating gadgets with a new purpose. On into his teens far more a collection of “Tap-Natch” works (see LKJ essay, Page 44) that place him gazing powerfully and profoundly from the was often foundthan in the shop working on vehicles and projects.

Jeff has Mt. Rushmore American authors.toWe have mighty spirit always believedofthat “If you WANT do it, youhis CAN do it.”

Thisever is with us for both consolation and inspiration. It can come upon one instantly—“All of his a sudden,” as Russell would say,racer or “By Drop,” as Stevie Ray sang so beautifully. Either way, Russell wasn’t stingy with how he has lived life whether as a Motocross or The demolition itexpert and that spirit is to as go much a part legacyThis as are the novels, essays, short stories and even an opera libretto. He gave freely of his gift and — inspired higher andofdohis bigger. publication covers Jamie Ellin Forbes at Artexpo New York we are all beneficiaries.

In describing Bob Dylan, whom he photographed extensively, Elliott Landy stated, “He intuitively understood what all the bases of an artist for whom no idea or possibility is out of reach.

Expressionist has blazedit awas new the art energy world. was going on in a situation. There was a feeling you got when you were with him that waspainter exciting.

I believe thetrail flow in of creative Private and corporate collectors find his powerful yet soothing In 2014 at Artexpo New York, I had the pleasure of meeting surrounding him that sort of spilled over onto you.” Elliot could just as easily have been taking about Russell Banks. imagery mined from thematter state ofyou his imagination to an be artist, perfect Vermeeren.

Hewith exuded energy enthusiasm sharing aHe never Interacting Russell, mostand could appreciatewhile his greatness. flaunted it.Pat It didn’t if waitress, a Kirmer portrait bywere PaulaMatthews compliments not conversations only offices and rooms, butontothe outside love of artcashier as his or mission Fire He Painting on metal carpenter, one of statement. the Valley Boyz. was genuine andwas real. People reminisce to about withliving him at the Inn, trail, new totent me.time.

The series works on “local” the following during Othersofstill talkdisplayed about which became pages a characterspaces in oneasofwell. his best-sellers or movies. He was still plucking subject a Promethean torch, the firetenacity” of his mind pierces through demonstrates the artist’s emergence boosted by the elemental matter from his surroundings right up to the end, his wisdom “shaped by theLike flinty ethos of North Country as one pundit from atrick was born to John and Johannah Kirmer in Hollywood, California on May 1, 1929.

Pat was one of six children, four boys time and allows for his galactic glimpse into the process of energy energywrote he captures hiswent works. thetop medieval alchemists, Jeffof The Magic Kingdom, published in November, 2022, attest to that.

France online.inHe outLike at the of his game.

Reviews His and two During hismore early years heinworked with John, in the family butcher shop. are He set enlisted in the Army during moving inprocess. the cauldron, transforming perception each is looking forgirls. the stone — gold — which hehis found final years saw himphilosopher’s becoming engaged gaining control offather, his book-to-film Three novellas tothe be published in of 2024. the Korean War, and served stateside for three years.

After leaving the service, Pat completed his college education at the California moment caught in time into the universal language of imagery Russell was writer withfire. power and depth akin to St. The Thunderer, who “scolded mankind with fury and sound to save in the mixing ofapaint with The mystery and thea prophet. alchemy areJerome, College Arts andHeathen” Crafts northern California.

He tohis NewofYork, where heexecuted received a Scholarship to the Museum set forth for viewing. forged experience the worldof the a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection poetry byand Phyllis McGinley) comes toNow mind.

ToBrooklyn me,with Russell was the merged infrom his artistic visionin(from via use of the material to moved produce Muddy Waters of literature, the class. If his you desired share his to spotlight, best by nothis be shucking.

“You have He to feel my pain,” cry to pursue his studies in art. head Uponofcompleting he went work atyou’ thedBaldwin School in Manhattan. taught art there and acknowledged audience, the artist’s story gains impetus vision.

Vermeeren’s “Abstraction Unbridled” lededucation, to this to current his characters singing their blues.

Russell, who initially saw himself as a visual artist, fell in love with literature and became a painter with words, for 30 years, and retiredthe in 1988. career at the Baldwin he worked the Baldwin School Camp in Valley, with every galleryatexhibition.

Each installment of Keene imagery is the collaboration between artist During and ourhis publication which we School, pushing paragraphs ofwith prose about as Franz Kline moved singular up,sequel down andthe across empty sheet.

Black on white. canvas, and ink New York.

This was his introduction to the Adirondacks and color his beloved Johns Brook. to lastancollection.

Vermeeren offersOil hisonpatrons are pleased to share all readers. on paper.

Russell’ s themes could bewife darkTherese, and desolate yet “deeply affecting andand highly (NYcreative of Cloudsplitter).

His Upon retiring, Pat and hispassion moved to Keene eventually purchased aTimes homereview on Market Street.them Johns admirers a entertaining.…” connection to his soul encouraging to Vermeeren’s innovative rings through while the Valley style was musical and poetic, fluid, complex, definitive, abstract, delicate, compassionate yet seething with anger.

You had to pay attention, follow Brook became Pat’s muse and he devoted the vast majority of his time painting the brook.

Pat was very engaged with the community participate via a window provided by each of his works of art. captivation of his process refined within layers of honed expression carefully oreven youmore would miss something that Department could minutiae orraffle of great importance toAnnual the story.

A movement, a clause, aengaged linear direction, a and volunteered at the Keene Fire selling tickets for are their Day. was very with We pleased to Field publish thisHe special collaboration with the Jeff becomes varied andValley established.

The be artist’s collectors, flashback or something in-between would keep a reader engaged and enthralled.

His written words reflected the hardscrabble circumstances of his Keene Centralhave School andtohe tirelessly on All setsthe for while many school plays. He was also known the “apple man”, of Vermeeren.

Picking up from ourasinitial foray into thebecause life and art and galleries grown anworked international status. characters locales—stern, often desolate—but always with faint—of hope,inlove and redemption.

People here in his custom of outhis apples to trick or treaters on Halloween. of Jeff — a 2015 cover feature which we recognized him with theyearly same and humility of passing spirit foreboding, and mission to share the beauty of a glimmer—however the Adirondacks gaze at a beautiful sky and call it a “Paul Matthews sky” after the artist’ s trademark cloud paintings, while others dealing with challenges the past several Pat had been at the Essex“Artist Centerof nursing facility.

He— took hisArt lastmagazine “brush stroke” on this the the Year” award Fine produces whatOver he creates with othersmonths, moves forward.

Like living other evolving of extreme tribulation would be living in a “Russell Banks day.” evening of artists, May 3rd.

Pat and Therese children and he was by two sisters, brothers. is survived by his 48 page monograph thatand willtwo introduce theHe artist to those new to inventive Vermeeren sailed had intonouncharted waters to predeceased How wonderful was it to his be inwife the Sandy, presencewho of such talent, to share even a few acquaint momentshis of his time? Great, mon.

Mi aand tell be yu. aHis greatbrother Kirmer liveHe in remains Santa Fe, New Mexico. his work, collectors to new works welcome expand Michael his horizons whileand encompassing fresh motifs. ness overflowed, to be tapped into as a river of life. He was a very kindly person, an educator who mentored, taught and encouraged. “Keep annualwhich Johnsoriginally Brook Scholarship to support a deserving graduatinglibrary. student from Keene Central School addition to any art-lover’s openPat to established the creative an energies drove himFund and the the faith,” he told me from the other side as I was shoveling around the car on that snowy January day shortly after his passing. To have his who plans to major in music, art, or theater.

Memorial donations may be made to the Adirondack Foundation, PO Box 288,future Lake We look forward with great anticipation to our changes produce. byline in they Fine Art magazine and have him as a subscriber, certainly made us feel good about our product. I thank you Russell for those Placid,The NYvitality 12916 of orthe visitcreations https://www.adirondackfoundation.org/funds/johns-brook-art-and-music-scholarship-fund.

All gifts will coverage of Jeff Vermeeren’s new creations. of this Post-modern blessings and your advice: “Don’t romanticize mobsters” andAbstract “Write the book, then sell it to the movies.”

–VICTOR FORBES be added to the John’s Brook Scholarship Fund. An open house celebration of Pat’s life at the Keene Valley Congregational Church was held at the Van Santvoord room on November 16 where many people cameINto 1975 share storiesTHIS about Pat. DEDICATED TO ESTABLISHED EDITION RUSSELL BANKS TRIBUTE EDITION RUSSELL BANKS PUBLISHED BY SUNSTORM ARTS PUBLISHING CO., INC. & NEIL ZUKERMAN

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Patrick Francis Kirmer Obituary

JAMIE ELLIN FORBES, Publisher A SUNSTORM ARTS CO. PUBLICATION jamie@fineartmagazine.com Layout, design, original photos & original text IN PRINT & ONLINE © 2023 SunStorm Arts Publishing Co., Inc. www.fineartmagazine.com POB 404, CENTER MORICHES NY • 631-339-0152 other work used by permission of coyright holder VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO CHASE TWICHELL VICTOR BENNETT FORBES, Editor DEB FORBES, JAMIE FORBES, FRANK OWEN, DANIEL HALPERN, MATTHEW HORNER, JAMIE FIGG, MAIA BANKS, victor@fineartmagazine.com NAJ WIKOFF, KRISTY FARRELL, ALEX SHOUMATOFF, PAUL GRONDAHL, JUSTINE HENZEL, CALABASH, POB 481, KEENE VALLEY, NY 12943 • 518.593.6470

LISA J GODFREY, MARY GRONDAHL, DAN PLUMLEY, ANDY FLYNN, MARTHA ALLEN, GEORGE DANIELS, RICK HENRY, PETE PLUMLEY, MALCOLM MacDOUGALL, MARTHA CORSCADEN, STEVE SULLIVAN, MARK NASSAN, ROBERT CARL

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CHASE TWICHELL, RUSSELL BANKS 3

Russell & Chase – Chase & Russell Inseparable for 36 Years

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met Russell in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1987. I was teaching in the Creative Writing program at the U. of A. and he came to town for a semester as that year’s visiting writer. The other faculty were mostly absent due to various romantic entanglements, so it was left to me to show the visitor around the campus and town. I had been trying to get someone—anyone!—to go to Birmingham with me to explore some of the restaurants there (Tuscaloosa was slim pickings), but everyone thought I was nuts to drive an hour in order to eat dinner. But the first day Russell was there he asked me if there were any decent restaurants in town, and when I told him he’d have to go to Birmingham he suggested that we go the next night. From then on, we’d take regular field trips in search of interesting food. Russell was married when I met him, so neither of us let ourselves even think about any romance. But semesters there were 17 weeks long, and we became very close friends, talking for hours about poetry and fiction, our childhoods and families, folk art (which we both collected), and, of course, food. In the 15th week we suddenly realized we were in trouble. It was truly an old-fashioned courtship, because when we had to face the inevitable consequences of our love, we each knew enough about the other to see exactly what –CHASE TWICHELL we had to do, hard as it was. We were together for 36 years.

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“I’m an omnivore. Actually, I can’t say I have a favorite food or food group. I take great – almost erotic – pleasure in eating. I’m delighted when I can find well-prepared food made from healthy and fresh components. I like to cook and I have gotten rather serious in the last few years about cooking, to my wife’s delight, and I realize what I really like. I do like cooking itself, the actual act of cooking, but I also really like shopping for groceries and working out a menu. I’m somewhat of an obsessive-compulsive and this gives me total control of the meal if I go shopping and buy the food, if I make the menu first and then go ahead and find what I need and so forth, and then prepare it and then cook it. I love the whole sequence really.”

– RUSSELL BANKS 6

Halloween photo by Martha Corscaden

Photo by Alina Wheeler 7

Chase Twichell Interviewed by Rick Henry

“Poetry is a tough vine and it flowers when you don’t expect it to.”

Chase Twichell is truly a poet of distinction. Her numerous and award-winning volumes of poetry, recognized in part by Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a seemingly endless list of awards, are expressions of her love of language at its most transparent. She has given extensive service to the profession, as reader, editor, juror, and as a teacher at over two dozen residencies and colleges. All of this has been deeply infused by her long-time engagement with Zen Buddhism. From lunches at the Blue Moon Cafe in Saranac Lake to exchanges through the ether, our conversations moved in many directions. Among them: poetry, place, loss, the mind, metaphor, Zen. RH: How did you get started writing poetry?

CT: I started out as a painter. In 5th grade, our art teacher had to take a sudden medical leave, so the school brought in a grad student from Yale. His name was George Chaplin. He was a genius, and later became head of the Art Department at Trinity College. At the time, he didn’t know a 5th grader from a cocker spaniel, but he was gung-ho. He used to dumpster-dive at the end of every semester at Yale, and scrounge all the half used-up tubes of paint and canvases that had been painted on that the students had thrown away. So we were painting with oils on used canvases he had us turn upside down. His only instructions were that we had to use the texture of what had been there before in some way, and finish the painting in less than an hour. That’s all. You could paint over it, expose it, but whatever was there had to have some influence on what you did. (That would be a good exercise for poets if you could figure out how to translate it). He taught us Josef Albers’ color theory (he was working with Albers at Yale).

Pick three colors and make the middle one look nearer. We just thought playing with color was fun. When I turned 14, I was sent away to boarding school. My parents were worried that I was too obsessed with painting, so I wasn’t allowed to study art in the new school. I started writing poems as an act of revenge.

RH: Geography seems very important in your work, especially the Adirondacks. How do place and poetry intersect?

CT: Growing up in the Adirondacks, the last major wilderness east of the Rockies, was probably the most formative influence on my work. It’s my imaginative bedrock. I’ve lived in many other places, but no other place has ever haunted me the way those stony mountains do. I lived in Alabama for a while. It was a great job, but the landscape left me cold. I was grousing about it one day, and one of my colleagues said to me, “But you could live anywhere, right?” I said, “No, in fact I couldn’t.” It’s not social; if I don’t feel a deep connection with the natural environment, I shrivel. I shrivel in New York City.

My family goes back four generations in Keene Valley. I tried like crazy to fall in love with some place other than the Adirondacks.

I looked all over northern Wisconsin and Oregon. Western Massachusetts was close. But there’s something about the Adirondacks, their ancientness. The mountains are very old and worn down, like teeth. The glaciers did that. My father used to say it was a virus. Once you had it, that was it. No cure. I certainly have the Adirondack virus. I’ve never found a place that moved me more.

I spent my childhood as an animal in the woods, identifying more with deer and coyotes and raccoons than I did with humans, no doubt partly because my parents had a rocky marriage. I’m very familiar with the flora and fauna. Even if I can’t name everything, I know what’s inside that rock if you smash it open, and how each plant smells. That intimacy is crucially important to me. The loss of the world as a wild, pristine space has been the biggest emotional blow in my entire life, including human ones—realizing that humans had touched every iota of the earth. I felt this way even as a kid, way before carbon emissions were in the newspaper every day.

RH: What do you notice when you go for a walk?

CT: First, I notice the trees. They’re tinged with wrong colors. That’s primarily from acid rain, caused by pollution drifting in from the coal-fired plants in the Midwest. Look at the birches; their leaves are blistered. The beeches are dying of a blight.

The spruce are rusty-looking. They’re dying. The short answer is that I see illness. If there’s a gum wrapper within ten miles, by eye will go right to it. Half our lakes can no longer sustain life. I know I sound like a fanatic; I am one! Good earth, bad humans!

RH: But there was joy once . . .

CT: Profound joy. But now it’s always tinged with sadness. The thing that most helped me get over it was writing a book called The Ghost of Eden. I think that writing that book was the equivalent first of mourning, and then of confronting the new reality: time without the missing loved one. Since then, I seem to be living what Keats called “a posthumous life.”

One thing I’m grateful for is that I learned a number of skills that have served me well: gardening, preserving, finding my way with a compass, making a fire with damp wood—basic human skills that most people have no idea how to do. Of course, in our current culture, people don’t need to know those things.

RH: Is there anything in the Adirondacks that you’ve had to give up?

CT: Climbing big mountains.

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RH: Are you a forty-sixer?

CT: Hardly! I grew up with boy cousins, a slave-driver father and a slave-driver uncle. We used to go on forced marches and I was miserable. I was always the smallest, often the only girl, the youngest or among the youngest. That’s my idea of hell—being forced to go up a mountain when I don’t want to. I burned out on skiing for the same reason. I do love hiking. I can hike for miles.

I’m just not slogging up any big mountains anymore. I also gave up fishing. There are very few native fish left; they’re all stocked.

Fishing for stocked trout offends me. But I do catch little brookies out of our brook and put them in the pond. I use a huge hook with no barb. Way too big for them to get in their mouth. I put a worm on it and hold a net on the bottom of the brook, then let the little guys eat the worm, slowly pulling them over the net. Then I put them in a bucket and take them to the pond. I have five in there. The last two of the last batch died last summer. One was 14 inches and one was 18. Huge! Brook trout rarely reach 12 inches. I just like to watch them and feed them worms from the compost. They come when I call them.

RH: You’ve learned fish language?

CT: Funny! I sing to them. Each year it takes them a while to remember, but they make quite a show when they realize that the worm lady is back.

RH: What about so-called wild animals? I’m driving down and I’m looking at every pond to see if there’s a moose.

CT: I’ve never seen a moose in the wild here. I know lots of people who have. I saw them at Yellowstone. One time I was camping with friends. One got sick and I had to drive her to the emergency clinic at 3 in the morning. In the park, all the animals were out. They were everywhere, taking back the night.

RH: We’re moving into language. I have too many questions for you. You have a lovely line or lines: “Then a question arose in me. What language does the mind speak before thinking, before thinking gives birth to words?”

CT: That’s a very Zen question. I think our brains are capable of understanding many kinds of language. The kind that is encouraged in our culture, our society, especially in the academic world, is intellectual in nature. It’s logical, linear. You’re supposed to be able to string things together in a way that’s generally accessible to anyone who thinks in that manner. It’s pretty obvious.

But the language of poetry involves tuning into a different channel of your brain that’s more associative, more sidelong. It can be illogical and yet make perfect sense. It can embody and embrace contradiction. If you can switch off the thinking part of the brain, the intellectual part, a wealth of information becomes available. There’s a web of connectivity between things that you can perceive if you’re willing to open your mind to it. It involves a willingness to not know. In Zen it’s actually called Not-knowing.

It’s like Keats’ negative capability. Are you willing to put your mind in a state of open receptivity without clutching after reason and conclusion? If you can do that, you can perceive all kinds of surprising things. That’s what poetry is especially great at. It does require a changing of the channels. I think everyone’s born with that capacity, but it gets quashed in us early on. That’s why people say poetry is too hard, or that they just don’t get it. They’re not willing to relax into that kind of knowing. I love teaching kids because that door is still wide open.

RH: Does language change what you knew?

CT: Yeah, it does. The central joy of my life has been trying to use language to say what I didn’t know I knew. To find language for what I know but have no words for.

RH: Is there something distinctively Adirondack about your ideal or imagined audience?

CT: Well, I suppose that fellow lovers of the Adirondacks might be drawn to some of the familiar imagery, but my imaginary audience is not particularly Adirondack. I’ve begun to let go of what I once thought of as a profound lifelong bond with the place.

In the new book, Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018), there are a number of poems set in Miami and other places, but the Adirondack ones are all elegies for the lost place. There’s a word I’ve heard lately (I can’t think of it at the moment) that means nostalgia for a place that no longer exists. It’s usually used regarding refugees who are full of intense longing for home, but home has been incinerated or blown up or overtaken by enemies. For me, place was the backbone of my imagination. I learned that nature is more reliable than human beings. I had parents who were at war with each other, and nature was a great solace to me.

It was my god. It still is in a way, though I’ve had to watch my god be stricken, mortally stricken by our species. I always used to think, Well, no matter what we do, nature will prevail. But that’s no longer true. We’ve killed nature in its original form, and that’s forever. I think that what we’re seeing right now—humongous storms, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps—is Mother Nature taking back the planet. It will survive in some form, but it’s profoundly wounded.

RH: I feel sorry for the young kids.

CT: Me too. But most of them never knew it the way it was, so their sense of loss centers more on the outrage of having had a healthy climate stolen from them and less on a lost intimacy with the natural world. It’s hard to write about this more subtle loss without sounding deaf to the larger picture.

Reprinted and excerpted from Blueline 41, 2020 by permission of the author 9

John Brown home as it stands today, photo by Deborah Lynn Forbes

Russell Banks touched lives through his art, heart

By NAJ WIKOFF, originally published in the Lake Placid News, January 12, 2023, used by permission

Russell Banks, a leading author of America, passed away on Saturday at his home surrounded by his family. Author of twenty-one books, two made into award-winning films (The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction), twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Banks was 82.

Drawing on his New Hampshire blue collar roots, Banks conveyed the challenges of working-class Americans struggling to make ends meet, deal with sorrow and disappointment, and find love and happiness. The Sweet Hereafter, set in a town imagined along the Ausable River between Keene and Upper Jay, tells of a lawyer seeking opportunity following a bus crash in winter that led to the death of local youth.

Banks connected the novel to Keene, his real-life community, by using family and place names firmly set in the region. He held the East-Coast premiere of the film version in Lake Placid under the auspices of the Adirondack Film Society. Director Atom Egoyan participated in a post-screening discussion moderated by Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News film critic and Lake Placid native.

Held in a near blizzard in January 1997, the screening packed the Palace Theatre and inspired launching the Lake Placid Film Forum, ongoing to this day under the name Lake Placid Film Festival. John Huttlinger, one of the founders, credits Russell for imbuing the festival with “a sense of serious devotion and attention to film. The product we put out was a little more thought-provoking, interested in bringing filmmakers together, including with film aficionados; an introspective kind of atmosphere. There wasn’t a lot of glitz. It had an incredible amount of substance. He brought many wonderful authors and screenwriters here, together with directors like Milos Forman and Paul Schrader.”

Banks’ novel Cloudsplitter tells the story of abolitionist John Brown from the viewpoint of his son Owen. Nominated for a Pulitzer, it helped launch a national reexamination of a description of Brown as a terrorist, revitalized an annual May pilgrimage to Brown’s farm and burial site in North Elba, and awakened locals to the role that Blacks have played in their region.

“Russell has had a greater influence than any other individual—certainly in the last fifty years—on revitalizing interest in and scholarship about John Brown,” said Martha Swan, founder and director of John Brown Lives! Cloudsplitter broke open the story. Here was Russell, at the pinnacle of his career, taking on this ‘controversial’ figure of tremendous complexity, introducing him to many who may not have known about or had an interest in John Brown.”

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“A HUGE AND THUNDEROUSLY GOOD BOOK”

Banks’ novel The Reserve was inspired by the Ausable Club. His sole opera, Harmony, premiered in August 2021 by The Seagle Society in Schroon Lake, is one of the few libretti written by a novelist. It recounts the young composer Charles Ives and his beloved Harmony Twichell’s quest for her father’s approval of their engagement to marry. The father, Rev. Twichell, turns to his good friend the author Mark Twain to intercede, to near-disastrous effect.

Banks’ wife Chase, Harmony’s grand-niece, relayed the material for the story. Composer Robert Carl, recognizing that Bank’s Rule of the Bone was loosely based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, encouraged him to try his hand at sharing Harmony’s story through opera. The action unfolds, as did the actual events, at Rivermede Farm in Keene Valley.

Banks sought artistic inspiration where he lived but also engaged in all aspects of community life. He was a steadfast supporter of the Lake Placid Film Festival, John Brown Lives!, and the Adirondack Center for Writing. He developed deep friendships, continuously championed others, and fought for civil rights against injustices of all kinds.

Nell Painter, a historian specializing in America, credits Banks, then her fellow Princeton faculty member, for encouraging her and her husband to move to the Adirondacks in the 1990s. She says they initially struck up a friendship over their shared concern for child abuse: “We became colleagues in African American studies at Princeton, rare for white colleagues in those days, as there was a lot of stereotyping around it: you can’t this or can’t that. Russell, a member of the Creative Writing Department, didn’t go along with that.

He was supportive as a member of the African American Studies Committee, involved in John Brown Lives!—kind of our anti-racist community up here—and in time introduced me to Martha Swan. I am grateful for that.”

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Russell’s mother, Florence Banks in 2005 working on her “next book” at the Neighborhood House, Keene Valley, photo by Martha Allen

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that.”

– Ernest Hemingway

John Brown sans beard, the inspiration of Russell’s Cloudsplitter, acclaimed universally as his masterpiece.

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Russell, Bedelu, photo by Margie Reuther

Russell holding grandson, baby Bedelu 13

MAIA BANKS

Dad and Me, Negril 1976. He was 36.

I’m getting his old dominoes from that era. Treasures now.

– Photo by Caerthan Banks My dad, Russell Banks died this morning at 1:10 am. I woke at 1:12, feeling his presence. I was with him for his last days. Grateful for his final kind words and loving gaze.

At left: My father’s skulls that he kept in his office (and the candle I received last night in the mail).

Thank you for your love, Dad. 1.8.23 14

Daughter Maia, Russell and daughter Danis, 2019 in Brooklyn

Granddaughter Sarah Banks, great-granddaughter Esben Banks Leue

Russell and daughter Caerthan Banks

Daughter Danis Banks and Russell

Russell with grandson Bedelu Banks Hendrie

Daughter Lea, her significant other John Goodrich, Russell 15

Russell and Hal Holbrook on the porch of Rivermede Farm, Keene Valley, NY

Russell and composer Robert Carl who wrote the music for Russell’s opera, Harmony. Photo by Naj Wikoff 16

Russell’s long-time editor Dan Halpern, Colin Channer (novelist and poet), Russell

“A great American writer and beloved friend of so many. I loved Russell and loved his tremendous talent and magnanimous heart,” Cloudsplitter (was) his masterpiece, but all his work is exceptional.”

– Joyce Carol Oates, noted author and former Princeton colleague.

Jeffrey Brown (who hosts PBS arts segments), his wife Paula, Raoul Peck (film director), Chase and Russell. The dog is Rebus.

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On the set of Affliction—Russell, Paul Schrader, Nick Nolte’s nephew Eric Berg, Chase, Holmes Osborn, Florence Banks

“I was trying to understand my own life, and also my father’s and grandfather’s,” Banks said in a 2019 review of Affliction by the New York Times. “I wanted to know what brought them to be the human beings they were, and why they inflicted so much suffering.’’

Director Paul Shrader, Russell 18

Nick Nolte, Russell, Chase, Florence on set

James Coburn (who won Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role), Russell, Nick Nolte 19

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“A Neighborhood Guy” Fondly Remembered “One can sense the presence of all these locals and influences in Banks’s work and often even locate it exactly in this story or that.”

By Kristy Farrell “A very therapeutic write for me.”

I worked at the Elm Tree Inn—aka “Purdy’s” (the owner’s family name). A burger and fries restaurant in the heart of “beautiful downtown Keene, New York” that was famous for its huge, juicy cheeseburgers, it’s hospitality, and it’s plentiful number of mirth filled evenings. Geographically, the restaurant parted the road for all travelers from the South; the Olympic village of Lake Placid to the left or scenic Whiteface Mountain to the right. The Elm Tree Inn and its fare was a must stop for oh, so many and though closed for many years now, is still talked about and asked about frequently to this day.

Everyone who visited Keene, seemingly, came to The Elm Tree. That is where I met Russell. I don’t have an exact memory of it, of course. I was a teenager, and I just knew he was an “author.” Which had as much interest to me at the time as drying paint. I was introduced to him at the restaurant, then saw him in my high school English class a bit later. My mature self is embarrassed I did not recognize the opportunity that was given to us as a class of eleven (my graduating class size) to sit and discuss Affliction with Russell himself.

After college, I returned to my home town of Keene which, during summer months, Russell also called home. I saw him often at the post office, Stewart’s, Cedar Run (my store), The AuSable Inn, The Baxter Tavern. Always with a hello and one of us coming up with something to make the other smile or chuckle. By then I knew what a literary giant Russell was, but nothing changed. Russell was himself regardless of where his book was on the best seller list or what actors he was associated with while they made his novels into movies. He was always interested in my world despite the enormity of his. I don’t think I am unique though, I think that was his rapport with many here.

Russell’s seasonal change of residence eventually prompted him to stop in my store at his arrival and departure for a quick hug, a hello, and to “catch up” on whatever was on his mind. I loved those chats. He had a classic Red GMC Pick-up truck I had coveted for many years. I loved to see it round the corner to visit Cedar Run during the summer months. Sometimes I was happy for the truck, and sometimes just to see Russell, and I sarcastically told him so. He joked that “all the ladies seemed to like his little red truck.”

In 2018 when I got engaged I secured the venue, then the ride. I e-mailed Russell about arriving in my favorite truck. I thought asking for the ride was a huge ask, so I preferred the e-mail in case of rejection. That rejection never came. Russell was happy I had asked, “Honored”, he said. I was overjoyed, of course. Needing to mail him information, I acquired his winter address and we both shared a chuckle in the coincidence that he wintered on “Purdy Avenue.”

On the day of my wedding Russell arrived at my home, played with my dogs, and waited for me and my bridesmaids out in my driveway. He had polished the truck that morning and was apologizing that there was just room for the two of us (my bridesmaids would follow in another vehicle). On the drive, we talked about a million things I can barely recall, but we made one stop on the way. Though the Elm Tree had been closed for several years, I arranged to have some chilled champagne and glasses on the covered front porch. Russell was happy to oblige my request to stop. We had one last drink at “Purdy’s”, then off to the ceremony.

Thank you Russell for letting this local girl hitch a ride with you in your “little red truck.” I will cherish that memory and others of you as the kind, REAL person you were.

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Russell and my Maid of Honor Beth LeClair and myself stopping on the way to my wedding for a Champagne Toast on the Elm Tree Inn porch.

Photo by Lisa J Godfrey

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Russell with the groom Jim Farrell 24

Photo by Lisa J Godfrey

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“Rebus,” Photo by Lisa J Godfrey 27

PHOTO BY ALINA WHEELER

When asked about her process – how she works – Chase responded: “I used to be a snob about it, and work exclusively with pen and paper, including multiple revisions. I killed a lot of trees. There’s something about the friction of handwriting that requires the mind to slow down a little, which makes room for things I might otherwise have missed. I also like the ability to quickly scribble lists of alternative words and directions in the margins, with arrows, question marks, etc. Handwriting is much more adaptable to non-linear thinking, other possible directions, and so forth.”

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Russell congratulates Pat Kirmer at his Keene Arts retrospective as Pat’s niece Johanna Hart looks on. Photo by Pete Plumley

Patrick Kirmer

Patrick Kirmer, known as “The Master of Johns Brook” for his almost daily sketches from his perch near to the bridge in Keene Valley from which he created thousands of real-time sketches, many of which became masterful meditations of the time-space contrinuum as seen through rushing and sometimes frozen water. Russell was a big fan as the above photo attests. “Until I was about 18 or 19 years old, even twenty,” he stated, “I still thought of myself as someone who was becoming a painter. And then I fell in love with literature.”

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MARTÍN ESPADA My friend Russell Banks has died.

Russell and I became friends in 1999 when he and I were judges for the Bellwether Prize, a fiction award funded by Barbara Kingsolver.

We spent the better part of a week in Tucson, reading with Barbara at a benefit for a sanctuary. He was always warm and generous with me, both in person and in his voluminous correspondence, no matter where he was in the world at the time, no matter when I needed to hear from him. He was a gregarious character and a great conversationalist. He hiked the Himalayas. He seemed utterly indestructible, until he wasn’t.

He introduced me onstage in May, 2018 when I received the John Brown Spirit of Freedom Award at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in Lake Placid, NY. It was one of my proudest moments, the torch passed on. As Naj Wikoff wrote in the Lake Placid News, “Martín Espada, a Puerto Rican American poet, fondly remembers his deep friendship with Banks. He described being disturbed by the film Affliction, screened at a festival they both attended. The next morning, Espada shared with Banks that he’d been unable to sleep: ‘Russell spontaneously stood up and hugged me. We didn’t know each other, but that’s how he was. Russell was generous, gregarious, and warm. We’d cross paths in all sorts of places. He had homes in Keene, Miami, and Saratoga and also traveled a lot. Yet, no matter what, from anywhere in the world and no matter what he was doing, he found time to write to me. There were times when I wrote to him in crisis, for advice, as a friend sharing details of my life. He would always write back. It was never a couple of sentences. It was always thoughtful, warm, and detailed. He cared. Russell gained nothing personally from that. Being a writer in this country can be transactional—for poets especially. If they give you something they want something. A lot of horse trading goes on. There are trust issues because people want something from you. Never once in his life did Russell ask me for anything. That’s amazing. Everything he did, he did from the heart because he believed it was the right thing. He reached out to me because I was a younger writer, he believed in my work, he championed my work. And he did this for not only me, but for many.”

National Book Award-winning poet, essayist, translator, editor, and activist, described by Russell Banks as “One of a handful of American poets ... forging a new American language. His ambition and his achievement remind us of Whitman, where it all begins.”

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I first met Russell and Chase around 1994 by chance at Lunigs restaurant in Burlington, VT. They were thinking about moving there as was I. But somehow we all ended up moving to Keene Valley. I was in a bad situation of horrible probate. What I remember most is that they related to me as if nothing was wrong. They took me under their wing and we had a lot of fun times together. Over the years Russell visited my gallery and he always had a gift of elevating the people he touched with his warm, genuine heart and smile. I was blessed to have experienced his outspoken and humorous down-to-earth honest persona. That was a privilege. Miss you buddy. – MARTHA CORSDADEN

Mark Nassan, of Leepoff Cycles and reggae singer Hylton Beckford at the Leepoff headquarters in Keene Valley. Russell had a love for cycling (as noted by Alex Shoumatoff in his essay on Page 60) as well as a love of reggae music, especially the “The Harder They Come” soundtrack album which features Hylton’s “Johnny Too Bad” (see photo with Linton Kwesi Johnson on page 43). Russell was about to join the Leepoff crowd on a ride “around the block”—KV over Spruce Hill to Elizabethtown and New Russia to the junction, back through St. Huberts. “Everyone was thrilled at the prospect of having Russell join us,” recalled Mark. “They were kind of intimidated, wondering how to address him. I told them to just call him Russ.”

“ONE FORMIDABLE DUDE” DUDE”

By GEORGE DANIELS

My wife Laurie and I moved to the area back in 1992 having just purchased the Bashful Bear Bookstore. The owner gave us a walk through and mentioned that the author Russell Banks summers here and you should absolutely familiarize yourselves with his work.

I had heard of Russell Banks but at that point I was pretty much reading 18th to mid-20th century works and was not yet that up on contemporary fiction.

My first thought is what happens if I can’t stand his work, it’d be so awkward to pretend to be a fan! That concern was quickly dispelled when I brought home Affliction and read it in two sittings. I never connected so much with a novel and hands down it still ranks number one as my favorite read. After that, I quickly devoured Continental Drift as well as most of his earlier works and was quite in awe of this man.

Throughout the mid-90’s Russell started accruing some real celebrity when The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction made it onto the big screen with so much acclaim. During this time, we moved the store to Keene Valley. Laurie and I got to know Russell and his wife, the incredibly talented poet Chase Twichell, a bit through book signings etc. Laurie and I convinced Russell to join us on an expedition to Ecuador and at this time I really got to know Russell through our training hikes in the High Peaks.

One has to understand that Russell then was one formidable dude. While I was this kind of skinny boyish guy with no particular talents and in complete awe of this celebrity author, he was this bear-like Hemingwayesque larger than life charismatic figure (think Ben Stiller’s character in Meet the Fockers to the intimidating Robert De Niro father character!) When we hiked I figured he’d do all of the talking and I’d be more than happy to listen. It didn’t work out that way at all. We chatted the entire hike and when I’d offer something he’d ask questions and delve further into my stories with such empathy and humor and then offer up his own anecdotes. I’d really never had that kind of repartee with another male—so refreshing and rare.

So what I found in Russell’s character, the reason he was such a successful writer—he listens, cares and hears you. Miss and always love you Russell.

So nice to have the opportunity to articulate my feelings about Russell.

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Upstate of storytellers, upstate of mind The New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany is deeply saddened at the death of our longtime friend and collaborator, Russell Banks. He truly was a great American novelist who enlivened Writers Institute’s programs on many occasions.

The literary world lost a lion with the passing of Russell Banks, who died Sunday, Jan. 8 at his home in Saratoga Springs.

Through his numerous visits to the NYS Writers Institute during the past 40 years and his decades-long friendship with our founder William Kennedy, we could proudly claim Russell as one of our own.

Whether he was alone on stage reading from his works, speaking on a panel discussion, or in his travels as the official New York State Author from 2004 to 2008, Russell’s presence ensured a brilliant, lively discussion.

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By PAUL GRONDAHL Director, NYS Writers Institute

ithin hours after Russell Banks died at 82 following a long battle with cancer at his home in Saratoga Springs on Jan. 8, I received an email from a friend, who is French.“I read the news of his passing in Le Monde this evening,” she wrote.

“It shows how much he was respected. So sorry for your loss. I know you loved and admired him a lot.” A friend in the Netherlands saw news of Banks’ death posted on Twitter. “Ah, this is so sad,” she wrote.

To those of us fortunate enough to have called him a friend, he was simply Russell: a jeans-and-flannel, scruffy beard, pint of draft beer, first-name basis kind of guy. He and his wife, the poet and publisher Chase Twichell, divided their time between Saratoga and a home in Keene. At their Adirondacks retreat, he wrote near a stand of maple trees in a converted sugar shack, with his dog, Rebus, at his feet. Instead of firewood, high heat and a cast-iron cauldron, Russell boiled down reams of notes and boxes of research with his keen imagination into prose as pure and sweet as grade A maple syrup. Around Keene, you might run into him at Stewart’s or the local hardware store and make small talk. Perhaps you did not realize that he was considered a great American novelist, a literary lion whose novels were published in foreign editions all around the world. Banks published 14 novels, six story collections, two books of poetry and three books of non-fiction. He was named New York State Author in 2004 by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. The critic Fred Pfeil called him “A writer we, as readers and writers, can actually learn from, whose books help and urge us to change.” Banks was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novels Continental Drift in 1985 and Cloudsplitter in 1998. The latter was his 758-page masterwork, a psychological excavation of the radical abolitionist John Brown, who is buried at John Brown Farm, a state historic site in North Elba, about 10 miles from Banks’ home in Keene.

Two of Banks’ novels were adapted into major feature films: Affliction, which won James Coburn an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and The Sweet Hereafter, which starred Ian Holm, in a shattering drama about a deadly school bus accident in a small mountain town in Canada not unlike Keene. Banks was authentic, comfortable in his own skin and at ease with his blue-collar roots.

His fiction evoked the hope and heartache of down-on-their-luck folks in hardscrabble towns, the kind of people he knew growing up under financial stress in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He rendered his character’s ordinary struggles on a mythical scale in partly autobiographical novels such as Rule of the Bone, published in 1995. Chappie, the novel’s narrator, a 14-year-old hoodlum, bolts from upstate New York with a hazy plan to escape to Florida, not unlike Banks’ own efforts to take a powder to the Sunshine State at 18 in a bid to re-invent himself.

The Writers Institute’s central aim is to enhance and celebrate literature, writing, and performance, and to recognize the position of writers as a community within the larger community. Books, films, plays and their creators can provide portals through which the most personal or complex issues of human understanding can be explored.

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 rom Roger Ebert’s 1999 Review of Affliction: “Nick Nolte is a big, shambling, confident male presence in the movies, and it is startling to see his cocksure presence change into fear in Paul Schrader’s Affliction. Nolte plays Wade Whitehouse, the sheriff of a small New Hampshire town, whose uniform, gun and stature do not make up for a deep feeling of worthlessness.

He drinks, he smokes pot on the job, he walks with a sad weariness, he is hated by his ex-wife, and his young daughter looks at him as if he’s crazy.” Director Paul Shrader told Ebert “I met with James Coburn (left) before the picture began and told him how carefully Nolte prepares for a role. I told Coburn that if he walked through the movie, Nolte might let him get away with it for a day, but on the second day all hell would break lose. Coburn said, ‘Oh, you mean you want me to really act? I can do that. I haven’t often been asked to, but I can.’ ” He can (and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in the film).

Ed. note: Ebert’s review is cited as it is indicative of what is required to (properly/accurately) portray a Russell Banks character and the rewards available to one for properly doing so.

The following is from a youtube review of the New York State Writer’s Institute video that is published on the following pages: “One of the greatest American writers of at least the last 50 years. I have to confess being initiated to Russell Banks by watching the film Affliction back in the late 1990s. I was laid over as a semi-truck driver in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and there was a movie theater near to my company’s terminal, so I went to see the film because it had three actors I loved: Nolte, Coburn and Spacek. I loved that film so much and because I loved the film, decided I would read the book. Everything Russell Banks has written, I have read. , short stories, all of it: PURE JOY. He is a true American Treasure. I pray he keeps going, keeps grinding and keeps writing.”

–VBF

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RUSSELL BANKS & WILLIAM KENNEDY

A Great Literary Kinship “The sort every writer hopes to find.”

Russell Banks discusses his novel Foregone (2021) with friend, fellow novelist and NYS Writers Institute Founder William Kennedy at NYS Writer’s Institute conference in 2021 with Director Paul Grondahl moderating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIg2dsMau1s&t=3s

Making Sense of Memories: A Conversation with Russell Banks and William Kennedy TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2021 • 7:30 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium, University at Albany

“Foregone is a subtle meditation on a life composed of half-forgotten impulses and their endless consequences, misapprehensions of others that are accepted and exploited almost passively, a minor heroism that is only enhanced by demurral. In the rages of a sick old man profound questions arise: ‘What is a life? A self? And what is lost when truth destroys the fabrications that sustain other lives?’”

– Marilynne Robinson PAUL GRONDAHL, Moderator: This is the final event in our fall series, and I’ve come to think of it as our grand finale. It’s Giving Tuesday, and what better gift for us to bring you on stage than two great American novelists, Russell Banks and William Kennedy. I think of them as literary heavyweights. And I feel a little like the ring announcer before a big heavyweight fight, like you know, AliFrazier. I’d start out in this corner, in the far corner, weighing in at 175, wearing the tan blazer, <laugh>, North End’s Albany Cyclone, Bill Kennedy, In the other corner, The Saratoga Slugger, Russell Banks. And if I had to score it, I think Bill has a longer reach, but Russell … I know he’s a street fighter and he has got a mean uppercut. But don’t expect any drama or fisticuffs or a fight to break out tonight. These are two great friends who have been there for each other over the long haul through thick and thin.

They’re the kind of friends we all cherish. Each one is here to celebrate a new book, a fresh new award and also to talk through the Dark Night of the Soul and to commiserate with each other. Whenever wrestling with a blank page turns into a grind, Bill and Russell are those kinds of great friends. The sort every writer hopes to find—a great literary kinship. I’m not going to run through a bio for each of them—we’d be here in the wee hours. I’ll try to do something a little unorthodox: a dual introduction. Combined, these two men of letters have published 22 novels, beginning in 1969 six non-fiction books, six story collections, two children’s books, two books of poetry, several screenplays, a few plays and two operas. But there’s more: two selections to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pulitzer Prize, two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, translations into more than two dozen languages.

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The writer who put Albany on the literary map, William Kennedy, is a very close friend of Russell’s, as well as my mentor and founder of the Writers Institute. He is the author of the Albany Cycle, a series of eight interconnected novels all set in his hometown.

The books reconstitute the history of the old Dutch city through wounded Irish-Catholic families struggling through pain and loss in a search for redemption. His novel of Albany’s Prohibition-era underclass, Ironweed, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep and garnered critical acclaim that likened Kennedy’s fictional Albany to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and James Joyce’s Ulysses.

They’re also two very generous and supportive mentors to countless young writers and to the literary community on the local, state, national and international levels. These are two writers who never forgot where they came from and they’ve payed it forward. A word on tonight’s format. Russell will start off by reading a section from his latest novel Foregone, the story of a Vietnam War draft evader turned filmmaker as he confronts his complicated past. One of 60,000 Americans who fled to Canada to avoid military service, Leonard Fife, now in his seventies, is dying of cancer in Montréal. He has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life.

In a review of Foregone, The New York Times Book Review wrote: “A character, a novel and a writer determined not to go gentle into that good night.” I should mention that there are copies for sale. Our great independent book seller, Bookhouse, is here tonight with copies for sale and we’ll have a book signing afterwards. Then Bill, after Russell finishes reading, is ready to jump in with his questions to kick off the conversation. We’ll leave time for audience Q and A and I’ll come around with a microphone and Bill will also make his way to the signing table. Wherever we go, people want Bill to sign copies of his books. We’re not gonna have any knockouts or any standing eight counts tonight. Just two brilliant writers and old friends talking about their craft. Please give a rousing Albany welcome for two literary lions, Russell Banks and William Kennedy.

RUSSELL BANKS: Thank you, Paul. That’s such a generous introduction and let me say what a pleasure and honor it is to be here. It’s nice to be back and especially under these auspices with my dear friend, Bill Kennedy. We’ve known each other and been close since 1986. That was so far back in time both our memories faded and we couldn’t recall where it was or how we met, but we knew by ’86 we were in regular touch from then on. I’m gonna just read a relatively short passage from the novel Foregone. It’s difficult to read from a novel, especially if the pieces are both as disparate and I hope integrated as the pieces of this novel are.

There’s a lot going on, cutting back and forth in time and point of view. But I will just give you a little information to begin with so you can follow it and this will give you some sense of the tone and the context of the novel, I hope, in ten minutes or so. The main character is Leo Fife—Leonard Fife—a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker of the left, celebrated over his lifetime. He was one of the 60,000 Americans who went north to Canada to avoid being inducted into the US military and sent to Vietnam. He is dying of cancer. He is being filmed making his last interview by a man, Malcolm, who is the director of the film with his assistant and producer Diana, the camera man Vincent and a sound person, a young woman, is also with them as well as Fife’s wife Emma and importantly Renée, a Haitian nurse who has been caring for Leonard. Fife has been telling the stories of his past and the truth of his past—his final confession, his last confession—telling it to the camera, to Malcolm’s camera. Cutting into Fife’s scrambled and scrambling account of what sounds like one of his many adulteries, Malcolm announces, “It’s time to take a break.” He and Diana need to consult privately. “Who the hell was Amanda? Where the fuck is this going? Is he just making it up?” Among the others, except for Fife, there is an aura of relief and audible exhalation. They haven’t been able to follow where Fife has tried to take them and are confused by the meandering route he has taken and exhausted from trying to keep up with him. They don’t understand his evasion of Malcolm’s and Diana’s prepared questions, his stubborn refusal to be properly interviewed. They don’t know what to believe. Does it matter? Everyone remains silent. After a few moments, Emma says in a choked voice, “It’s the medications. Sometimes he confabulates, like he’s dreaming.

We shouldn’t be doing this.” She suddenly asks Malcolm to destroy what they’ve shot so far. “It’s not even half true. Most of what he’s saying is mis-remembered and half-invented or completely made up. It’s wrong to be filming it Malcolm, even if you end up not using it.” The lights come on and Fife looks around at the six others. Renée and Emma seated on the sofa behind him, Sloan and Vincent standing by the camera, Diana clutching her clipboard in the corner of the room. Malcolm standing next to Fife in his wheelchair, in the center of the room, in front of the camera. Malcolm lays his hand on Fife’s skeletal shoulder and softly pats it.

Renée tells Fife that it’s past time for her to empty his bag and give him his Prednisone. Diana says to no one in particular, though it’s clearly directed to Emma, that “Leo seems to want to continue, so why not let him? It’ll all come together and make sense when it’s edited.” She likes the stuff about his early ambitions to be a poet and writer. It’s relevant to his shift to film, and people will want to hear about his American years in the 1960s, she points out. Okay, some of it’s a little too personal and private maybe, and not very clear, but that can be edited out so no one’s hurt or confused. A lot of this can be cut. The two and a quarter hours they’ve shot so far might come down to barely 15 minutes of screen time, for instance. Sloan asks, “Did you really not know about this, Emma? I mean the wife in Virginia and the son? and the other wife, the first one, and the baby girl?” “Jesus, Sloan, leave it alone,” Malcolm says. He tries explaining to her and probably to himself and the others as well, that all kinds of things have been mixed together in Fife’s mind. He quotes Emma, “it’s the meds, confabulation, memories, hallucinations, fiction in films, other people’s stories, fantasies. It’s like trying to tie a novel to the author’s real life, he says, you can’t do it. We shouldn’t worry. Emma knows the story of Fife’s life better than anyone.

She’s been living and working with him for 40 years.” “I’m sorry,” Sloan says, “I didn’t mean to.” Emma says, “I know everything about him that I need to know.” “ Jesus, you’re talking about me as if I’m not in the fucking room,” Fife says, “Like, I can’t hear you. I do hear you.” Emma says, 34

Russell reasoning with Fidel as William Kennedy (American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Ironweed) looks on

“You’re right, darling. I’m sorry.” Malcolm says he’s sorry, too.“Come on folks. This is Leo’s show, not ours,” he reminds her. Renée releases the brakes on Fife’s wheelchair and declares that she must take “Monsieur Fife back to his room for a few moments if they wish to continue today with the filming and (if ) Monsieur Fife feels strong enough to comply and wishes to do it,” she will bring him back to the living room. She looks at Emma as she says this, as if it is Emma’s decision whether to continue the filming. Then straightway she wheels him from the room. As they cross the dark hallway and pass into the dining room, Fife speaking English, says to Renée, “I’m not confabulating. You know. I’m really not. And it’s not the meds and Emma’s wrong,” he says, “she doesn’t know everything about me that she needs to know.”

He did live in Virginia where he was married and he had a son. And before that there was an 18 year old girl he met in Florida and he got her pregnant and married her when he was 19 and went with her to Boston where they had a daughter. He insists it’s all true. He remembers it like it happened yesterday. “Do you believe me?” he asks Renée. She answers, “I believe that you believe it’s true.”

She wheels him through the kitchen and on to the bedroom and bathroom that he has not shared with his wife for nearly two months.

He wonders how much he was able to say to the camera this morning of what he actually remembers. He knows there was a synaptic snafu between the data received from the memory banks of his hippocampus and his prefrontal cortex that scrambles the words he’s led to speak when he tries to convert that data to speech. It is another reason for wanting Emma there. She’s the only one that can bridge the gap between his memories and his descriptions of them, as if he is speaking in a language that only she and he understand. He and Emma are his brain’s only native speakers. This is love, is it not? It’s the same as when he first wakens, but is not yet completely awake.

Or when he begins to fall asleep and has not yet fully entered sleep. He speaks aloud, half inside a dream and half outside it. Emma, lying next to him or reading silently in a nearby chair says, “What? What are you talking about, Leo?” And he says, “It’s nothing. I was dreaming,” but he wasn’t dreaming. He was caught for a few seconds between being asleep and being awake and the two worlds briefly overlapped. And there was a break, a gap between what he was seeing and hearing and what he could say of it and he was unable to speak for that gap and had to cry out like a mountain climber fallen into a glacial crevasse, suspended from his rope, calling for help to a search party miles away. His rescuers hear bits and pieces of his cries carried on the wind, but are unable to make out the words or determine where they’re coming from. His speech is not garbled or blocked in any way the way it would be if he suffered a stroke or an injury to his brain. He’s not aphasic. He’s almost two separate people and one of them remembers in great detail a distant past and the other who does not remember anything of that past, yet tries to describe it. The conflict causes a loud sparking static that makes it nearly impossible for him to hear what he is saying just as he cannot see what the camera is seeing. He no more knows what he sounds like through Sloan’s mic than knows what he looks like to Vincent’s camera and to the six other people in the room. He is sure that he has said nothing that is not true. He has not lied, but he does not know what he has said. Maybe that’s how it goes when you have not lied, you don’t know what you have said. Only liars know what they have said.

Renée unclips the bag of urine from the catheter tube and empties the bag into the toilet. She wraps her arms around Fife from 35

behind and eases him from the wheelchair to the toilet. He’s not paralyzed, but his limbs and trunk are too feeble to carry the weight of his body. He has lost nearly half his 200 pounds of muscle and bone and is as light as he was at 14. She slips his sweatpants down his scrawny thighs and goes to the door and tells him to call her when he’s ready to be wiped and leaves him alone sitting on the toilet with his pants puddled at his ankles. There is nothing left of his life now except what’s in his brain and the fluids that pass through his bowels and bladder and the cancer cells that are devouring his bones and flesh, munching on his organs, shutting them down one by one. He has not been able to digest solids for weeks. He hasn’t had sex with Emma or anyone else for three years, nor has he managed to ejaculate for nearly a year. No one who isn’t being paid for it wants to touch his body. Not even Emma, not even he himself. What’s left of his life now, who he is, is only what’s inside his brain, which is only who he was, nothing more. The future does not exist anymore and the present never did. And no one knows who he was. No one can know unless he tells her, Emma. He could go silent the way he stopped eating, an act of will made easy by exhaustion and the drugs that have killed his appetite. But if he goes silent, he will disappear.

Except for his memories, all living traces of his past, all the witnesses and evidence have been erased by years of betrayal, abandonment, divorce, annulment, flight and exile—eaten by time the way his body is being eaten by cancer. Time, like cancer, is the devourer of our lives. When you have no future and the present doesn’t exist except as consciousness, all you have for yourself is your past. And if, like Fife, your past is a lie—a fiction—then you can’t be said to exist except as a fictional character. In telling his story to Emma, Fife is not trying to correct the record, he’s trying to stay alive or more accurately he’s trying to come to life like a Pinocchio, a puppet made of wood, ingeniously carved and assembled so as to closely resemble a real human being. A much admired Canadian documentary filmmaker, a teacher, a beloved friend and husband, a trusted man of the Left dedicated to exposing hypocrisy, greed and political corruption. But he’s really only a wooden puppet whose strings have frayed and broken one by one. And now his clever maker, Leonard Fife, the man himself, the village wood carver, can no longer make him dance and play at being a real boy anymore. He lies collapsed in the corner of the wood carver’s hut, a pile of sticks and cloth, until the big strong Haitian nurse returns to the bathroom and lifts him away from the toilet and wipes his buttocks clean of dribbled shit and re-attaches his penis to the tube and swings his body back into the wheelchair. Who is he then? Renée asks him if he wishes to rest in bed or lie in the shade by the bedroom window. Fife tells her to take him back to the living room. She says that if he returns to the living room, she will have to attach him to the IV. “If you insist on continuing with the interview, you will need nourishment and hydration. “You are being very foolish, Monsieur Fife. Those people are only interested in making their movie. Madame Fife does not want you to waste your strength on this project. Let her tell them to go away and if you are strong enough to continue tomorrow, they can come back then.” Fife smiles at her. He says “It’s like I’m the old Italian carpenter, Japetto, the guy who made a puppet out of wood named Pinocchio, but I’m too old and feeble now to pull the strings for the puppet show. For the first time the puppet has to put on the show all by himself. I’m Japetto, but I’m the puppet too. The wooden puppet, who thanks to the intervention by a blue-haired fairy, was resurrected as a real boy. How does my nose look, Renée? Check it out. Is it longer today than yesterday?”

“Your nose looks the same as always.”

“Did you ever read the story of Pinocchio, Renée?” “No, but I have heard of it. It is a child’s story, is it not?” “Yes, but it’s too scary for children. It’s about lying and dying. Lying and dying, and the vanity of believing in resurrection. You said the real boy was resurrected? No, the wooden boy was resurrected, which gave him a second chance at dying. Only this time for real. Wooden boys don’t die. They’re like storybook characters that live on even after the story’s over.” “I would not like it then. I am a Christian. There was a movie about it, was there not?” “Yes. A Disney movie, but it left out all the scary parts and the vanity of believing in resurrection.” “Did the movie leave that out?” “Yes, it did.” “Then perhaps I would like the Disney movie. I believe in the Resurrection.” (applause) I thought I’d start out on a cheerful note, (laughter) and read the fun parts.

WILLIAM KENNEDY: This book of yours is a terrific novel and really gets inside of a guy. I haven’t read one lately like this, but a lot of people have talked to me about this novel and they see quite a few similarities between you and the protagonist, Leonard Fife.

We know all about him from what you just read and … I can’t see anything because I left my glasses home … I read a story about what happens to you when you turn 80. The guy wrote it when he was 81 and one of the things was that he lost his glasses and he found them in the freezer of the next door neighbor.

AUDIENCE: Try these!

WK: That’s the readers. That’s exactly what I need.

RB: I would’ve loaned you mine, but I’m helpless without them too. (laughs).

WK: Very good. Thank you for the bifocals. Well, anyway, I’ll read this: “He insists his wife, Emma, his third wife, be in the room when he talks for the interview for the film. Otherwise he won’t tell the truth. So he confesses that he sees what his betrayals of her were, and he tells her about them. He’s a man who thinks he hasn’t loved anyone ever, and nobody has ever loved him, and he wants redemption and love from her before he dies.” Well, you, Russell, you are obviously not dying, you are robustly healthy and energetic, doing more things than writers are supposed to do. And then you’ve got a few of the pesky ailments that accrue to those of us who managed to get past 80. You’re 81, right?

RB: Right.

WK: I’m not gonna say what I am, and it’s older than that. But in addition to being one of the greatest American novelists, you’ve been a filmmaker yourself like Fife for more than 30 years, and you’re still at it. Fife goes to Cuba to join Fidel Castro’s Revolution and you went to Cuba to join Fidel Castro’s Revolution. Also, Jack Kerouac, who went on the road, as we all know, and Huck Finn, who is maybe your favorite book of all time. He lit out for the Territory. Kerouac, I seem to recall, actually came to your house.

RB: One of the worst weeks of my life actually, (laugh) was when Kerouac crashed in my house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Paul and Mary Grondahl with Russell at 2017 symposium “Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World,” a NYS Writers Institute event in which Banks participated. Photo courtesy of Mary Grondahl

WK: What about that?

RB: Be careful what you wish for! (laughter) WK: What about that scene in the book with Bobby Zimmerman and Joan Baez? Is that real for you? Did you have an evening like that with those two guys?

RB: This is an interesting and important question probably to try to answer. I’m not sure I can answer it, which is the relationship between the author’s personal history …

WK: I haven’t finished the question.

RB: You asked me about Baez and Dylan because they appear in the life of the main character in the novel. The implied question, I think. was “Did they appear in the life of the novelist, right?

WK: Yeah.

RB: Well, I don’t think I need to answer that actually. I’ll take the fifth on that.

WK: That’s fine. That’s fine. It’s your privilege. A guy who likes to keep his life secret, he doesn’t put it in a novel. Alright, I really love when you went on the road in the book, like Kerouac did. Nick Farina steals his father’s car and you steal money from the store you’re working for. I don’t know how much you stole. What did you steal? That’s not you, it’s Leonard Fife (laughs). No, you would never steal anything. (laughter) Anyway, I love that scene—all those scenes when they get on the road are really terrific. They drive off from New England to California and then they’re gonna head off to Australia. They’re 16 years old. Needless to say, they don’t get to Australia, but they do get to California eventually. It’s a great section, very defining of the kids. But there are several more equations between you and Fife and of course, of course, of course—this is a novel, not an autobiography, and you’ve also gone out of your way to make Fife an extremely unreliable narrator. Even his wife says he’s fantasizing history and this casts a doubt on the veracity of everything he says to the director’s camera. So a question is raised, are you obliquely confessing things that actually happened to you? Is this nobody’s business?

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Are you as unreliable a narrator as your protagonist? And why is the whole story layered with ambiguity? Let’s say that last question is the last phrase is the end of the question—too long a question—but that’s the way it is. I didn’t have enough time to make it shorter.

RB: Sure. It’s an important question, and I hope the novel raises not so much the question of what is the truth that lies behind the narrative—the fictional narrative—the truth of the author’s life. I was hoping among other things that could be dramatized in the novel is the function of the imagination in the creation of the story of one’s life. I was trying to do this by deliberately alluding to yes, the facts of my own life at the same time, making it clear that this is an imagined life. So that the tension between the two would be persistent and consistent enough throughout the whole of the novel that what might in some other novel be a sub-theme would be raised up to a major theme, which is the function of our imagination in the making of our own life’s story through memory and through our felt and remembered and known experience, our longings, our desires, our real and fantasized and dreamed experience—that the novel could dramatize that. Most novels don’t bother with that, but most novels are actually created out of that tension, that very tension.

There is a meta level to the whole narrative, no question about it. I wanted the reader to be aware of that, but I didn’t want to make that the point of the novel. It was an attempt to try to use that material and use the insights that I had with regard to my own narrative. This is not a book I would’ve wanted to write and when I was younger, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to write when I was younger. But hitting my late seventies, I became increasingly aware of memory and of its fallacies and of its necessity, of its irrepressible presence in my life. From the passage that I was reading a little earlier, the function of the past in my present life became greater and greater. How much of that was reliable? How much of that was true in some historical sense? These are all themes that became increasingly important to me in my late seventies. I just tried to write a novel which could touch that rail—that electrified rail—in a way that was running through my life during those years. It still is, but it was particularly present to me and particularly poignant to me over those years I was working on this book. So, yes, it’s deliberate. I’m not trying to play games with the reader or the biographers or the critics. I’m really trying to explore the power and the fallibility of memory and the necessity of it, among other things. I hope the novel does other things as well. You mentioned the recurring theme of the runaway, first the boy, then the adolescent, then the young man and then the older man, and now even in old age, a man who has constantly run away from the domestic locale of his life to the territory out there which in doing so always inevitably brings with it abandonment and betrayal. You can’t run away without leaving something behind or more often the case, someone, so that scene recurs over and over and over again and here he is finally at the end.

He can no longer run away. And trying to in some way come to grips with that and perhaps acquire through this confession, through this presentation of self to the camera—can in some way provide for himself or obtain for himself redemption…for those betrayals and abandonments that have characterized his life, both publicly and privately. That’s an elaborate answer to your question WK: The secrets have kept him from seeing Emma clearly, and from being the object of his best attention, these are your words. Then perhaps in this final, blatant, willful exposure of his secrets and lies is his way, his only available way, to finally give her the quality of attention that makes love possible. Despite his unloving and unlovable past, he means to go out loving and loved with no secrets, no lies. It’s not heroic. It’s merely the end of a lifetime of cowardice. This sounds like a really true statement, but is it just his imagination or is he imagining this in order to convince himself that that’s what he’s doing and see if it works with her?

RB: I think he is trying to tell her, finally, the truth. He says that he can’t do it unless he’s in front of a camera. He can only tell the truth to her, in a sense, through the camera lens because if he’s with her alone personally, he will lie to her and try to seduce her in some way, try to make her love him. Only through the camera’s eye can he love her sufficiently to tell her the truth of his life as he understands it, as he remembers it. It’s very important, you know. Something that runs through this thing is an awareness that Fife and as it turns out, one or two of the characters as well, is that who each is speaking to alters dramatically what each says. If Fife ia speaking to the camera alone without his wife present, then he’s speaking to everybody. But if he’s speaking to the camera with her present, then he will alter what he says in order to tell the truth. I think this is true for fiction writing especially. We deal with it every single day when we sit down, we have to decide with each sentence, who is this sentence being uttered to? Even when it’s a third person sentence, it’s not in the first person character’s voice. You still have to concern yourself with it because you have to know what to leave in and what to leave out, what range, what tone to take, what’s the inflection that you use, what’s the vocabulary that you use, the diction, everything, every choice you make with regard to the language that you use is shaped by who you think you’re talking to.

This is true for him. He has to set up a situation whereby he knows exactly who he’s talking to and he’s confined by the limitations and the discipline and the rigor of something he understands very deeply, which is a camera. He’s a filmmaker above all else, a documentary filmmaker, and in that context he finally feels he can tell the truth. I know it sounds probably more complex in summation than it actually is on the page. I think over time, it’s much clearer as it unfolds. It’s hard to summarize one’s own book or its intentions. You hope you leave that to the critics and you’re never seriously asked to do it yourself—as I know you’ve been through this. But that comes as close as I can get to it in this regard.

WK: My personal problem is that every time it has to be not true when I’m writing it. I tried to use my own personal experience when I was writing very old poems and I was trying to recapitulate my life in Germany during the Korean War, and I couldn’t do it. I mean, I was so damn bored by my own life I couldn’t…it had no imagination to it. I had to really reinvent myself in Germany.

RB: Well, up to now I’ve almost never borrowed so heavily from the events—the actualities—of my own life in fiction. It is true that I moved up as close as I’ve ever dared, let’s say, or been able. I’d rather put it that way, been able to approach the actualities of my own life.

Almost always, I felt as you did, bored by my own life and I didn’t want to write about it. This wasn’t because I was afraid of it. It just like, it left me cold and I was much more interested in other lives very different from mine or only tangentially connected to mine. But I wasn’t interested in my own personal history at all. At this point in my life hitting, as I said, my late seventies and so forth, I was kind of intrigued by the narrative as it unspooled backwards in time and it seemed distant enough almost from me, so that I could approach it imaginatively. Maybe it was boring to you when you were trying to write about your time in Germany, that you couldn’t approach it 38

imaginatively. Whereas in this case, I could now, at this point in my life. It’s different writing for me today. I don’t know if this is true for you, Bill. I’d love to know, we’ve talked about so much over the years, and maybe this is something we should talk about too. I’ve been writing for over 60 years. You’ve been doing it for over 70 and I find that in these years now, I am more and more inarticulate when it comes to describing the process; less and less conscious of what actually goes on when I’m writing than I was just ten years ago and certainly than I was 20 or 30 years ago. The reason being perhaps that there is a lot less static, there’s a lot less anxiety, there’s a lot less fear in my writing now. I don’t worry about anything in between me and the writing. So I feel freer to engage material that is in fact autobiographical, that I didn’t feel in the past. There’s a kind of liberation that has occurred over the last decade or so, it feels for me.

WK: Well, when I was writing, when I finished writing Legs after six years, I felt like I really learned how to write a novel. I wrote when my son was six years old and the manuscripts were taller than he was.

RB: So I didn’t worry for the next few books. But every time it was a re-learning process. But now, in these last two, three books, I’d find that I have to re-learn all over again. It’s like there’s certain things about the writing process that I have to energize myself to, you know, read the critics again, or just … there’s a something that has to set me off in a way. I guess it’s memory that has disappeared in certain ways as you age.

WK: Just one final twist here on the ambiguity of this and what is Fife’s monologue. He no more knows what he sounds like through Sloan’s microphone than he knows what he looks like to Vincent’s camera and to the six other people in the room. Here it is. “He is sure that he has said nothing. That is not true. He has not lied, but he does not know what he said. Maybe that’s how it goes. When you have not lied, you don’t know what you said. Only liars know what they have said.”

RB: I believe that.

PG: Can we go to audience questions as we promised AUDIENCE: Why was the Kerouac visit the worst week of your life?

RB: Well, actually probably it wasn’t the worst by any means. I’ve had worse weeks, but it wasn’t a great week. He showed up at my doorstep in Chapel Hill. I was a student living off campus in a rented house with my wife and two children. And I got a call from a bar downtown. “Hey, Russ—Jack Kerouac’s in town with three guys who say they’re Indians and they want to have a party. Can we come out to your house?” And they did. I looked out the window and 20 minutes later there was a line of cars coming from town out, and they stayed for a week. About the third night into it—my wife had almost left me by then—the Indians (who were Micmac cousins of Kerouac from Quebec) got into the medicine cabinet. This was 1967 and in those days, in most medicine cabinets, younger women like my wife kept a big bottle of Dexedrine for diet control, which your doctors would happily prescribe for you and so the Indians got into the medicine cabinet, which is a title I’ve always wanted to use but don’t dare (laugh). As a result, Kerouac—and everybody else—stayed up for another four days until finally he left and moved on down to Orlando, where shortly after that, in fact, he died.

Yeah, that’s the Kerouac story—the bones of it.

AUDIENCE: I have a question because the words came up earlier. One was confession and the other is redemption. So I want to know—and I’m not asking from Bill’s point of view about you—if the character feels that through the process of other witnesses, he is telling his truth, then she will speak some sort of forgiveness.

RB: That cuts to it. The question is really for her and indirectly, then, for the reader, and maybe more even directly than that, for me, the writer, can I forgive him? Do I forgive him by the end? It’s a question I can’t answer for anybody else, but I can for myself. And yes, by the end of the novel I forgive him. He dies alone and he is aware of that and the pain of that. But the clarity of that makes it possible for me to forgive him because he’s conscious of that. He comes to consciousness through that.

AUDIENCE: Is there redemption?

RB: Yes. Yes. You will see that in the book, I think. The next to last chapter, I think is where you get there. You know from Chapter One he’s going to die before this book is over. But to get to that point, the question is exactly the one you raised: Is redemption possible? And yes, it’s possible only if we forgive him. We have the authority as writers, God-like authority as writers and readers. And the question is whether we forgive him or not. So I leave that to you to answer.

AUDIENCE: We have this confession, and then there’s realization and sorrow with the hope of love. Is that in the book?

RB: It’s implicit and buried under perhaps the title Forgone. I will confess that the book is modeled as, I think, in every novel with literary ambition which has in it a kind of a ghost in the works—whether the writer is conscious of it or not—and it hovers over it and guides it in some ways. In this case, it it’s the death of Ivan in Tolstoy’s great long story The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I was very conscious of writing in that shadow and with that intentionality both structurally and in terms of the characters, Ivan Ilyich and Leo Fife.

PG: What a pleasure it is to see both of you living legends—living, writing, working and doing what you’ve been doing all along. It’s such an inspiration. Thank you for being the people you are and for giving us the magical works you provide for us. I did have a thought about what you were saying about redemption as long as you’re sitting here. So he’s someone who went to Canada from that age where that was certainly an option. But he stayed there and at one point our country allowed those who had gone over—I think Clinton was the one who signed it—that there was a clemency, a general clemency and there again is the idea of forgiveness. The country was willing to take them back. I’m just wondering if that becomes something in the book that makes Fife so special?

RB: That’s built into it—the whole business of fleeing to Canada to avoid military service in Vietnam. And regarding that, as a principled stand, actually, Joan Baez does come into the story at that point, because there were 60,000 Americans who went North. Trudeau Sr., father of the current Prime Minister, offered them refugee status which meant they couldn’t be extradited to the United States, to the 39

great frustration of Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon. All the FBI agents who were chasing these guys now were sent out of the country, out of Canada, back to the US and so these men—and they were all men, and they were mostly white, college educated in their twenties— regarded themselves as something like heroes and the Canadians did too by and large. Joan Baez appeared on the scene, gave a great concert in Toronto, which is described in the book, and she denounced them, denounced them for not staying home in the United States and going to prison as her husband David Harris had done and stopping, as she said, the war machine. If 60,000 American men had refused to go into the military and had chosen prison instead, the war would’ve ground to a halt almost immediately. That was her argument. And there’s a radical confrontation—self-confrontation—among those Canadians there that’s running through this story of the American expats who went north, and Fife’s a man who was among that cohort. That’s his personal public history and what he’s identified as throughout. He’s part of what he’s describing as the actual conditions of his going north, which were much more morally ambiguous than perceived from outside.

WK: In the year 2000, Russell wrote a terrific essay in Harper’s magazine, and it was called Who Tell The People. In it he decided that nobody in America was writing the story of America’s origins and he singled out me and a few other writers as having not fulfilled … haven’t done it. I’m sure that it’s true. It’s a very logical story that he wants to go back and define the origins of this nation in fiction, starting in the beginning, the early, the very early 17th century. What he says we are all doing is what we have been doing in the 20th and 21st centuries, not one story of our beginnings, but many that we tell ourselves. Euro-American origin tales, African-American, Native American, Asian-American, Latin American, and so on. Also, he mentioned a few new constituencies that have come into existence in recent years—women poets, people with incurable illnesses and so on. All these groups compete with one another and here’s a direct quote: “I don’t mean to criticize contemporary tellers of these tales, many of whom—William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rudolfo Anaya—are powerful, deep writers. The point here is that none of their stories alone is sufficient unto itself as an American story of origins.” It’s a long essay, it’s wonderful essay. I read it four or five times, I just read it again yesterday.

He offers a theory that the one narrative that all Americans North and South could share in share is the African diaspora. “There is no town, no country, no state in America that has not been profoundly affected by the events, characters, themes and values dramatized by the story of race in America.” That’s this in a nutshell, that’s the premise of a wonderful essay. It’s a challenge, of course, and I wonder about what you’ve been doing, what you think about your own work. When I think about all the books that you’ve written, I think that if you start collecting certain of them, like Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift and Rule of the Bone—these books seem like a beginning if you collect them. A beginning of your novel, your work of fiction.

RB: I guess so. It’s not a conscious and deliberate lifelong decision. It’s simply the product of my own consciousness and imagination and my own way of understanding the world that surrounds me. It happens that as a result of my body of work now having accumulated one can say there are obviously unifying themes—consistent and recurring themes—and they almost always loop back around to the origin story of race in America and on this continent and how it lives on into the present and into the foreseeable future. It’s a story that I feel compulsively drawn back to every time I sit down to work. I don’t feel that I made a decision that’s ideological or even sociological or historical. It’s not that kind of a decision. It’s just drawn back to how I see the world and how I see human beings and the context that seems to me to surround human beings…surrounds me, surrounds my children, surrounds my grandchildren, surrounds my neighbor’s lives, surrounds the lives of everyone in this room. It’s how I see it. The work will necessarily, then, express that and I hope in dramatic, interesting, engaging and emotionally moving ways that ring true to the reader and correspond to the reality that the reader sees. That essay you’re citing is—was—a kind of attempt to make a statement out of where you sometimes do step aside and stop and listen to your own song and say, ‘Oh, I see.’ That’s what that song is trying to do, trying to say. You hear your own voice for a minute or two, and in a way that you normally don’t. It is the nature of your own enterprise, your own lifelong work and that was one of those moments where I was trying to do that.

WK: What is your conclusion as of the moment? What’s the status of the possibility of this book ever getting written, this great American Creole novel?

RB: Well, I don’t think it has been written. I certainly don’t think I’ve written it (laughter), but maybe one could write it if one had ten or twenty chances and approached it in ten or twenty different ways and directions.

WK: Do you think anybody’s writing it right now?

RB: The last person who I thought wrote it or came as close as it as anyone has in our literary history of our time is Toni Morrison.

I don’t think anyone else has come as close as she to writing the novel of our Creolized birthright and I think she did that more than anyone else has.

PG: The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel Foregone—a challenging, risk-taking work marked by a wry and compassionate intelligence. It’s a wonderful night. Let’s hear it for Russell Banks and William Kennedy!

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excerpted from an interview in the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review.

Review.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader.

I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest.

It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. speech.

“Russell Banks is, word for word, idea for idea, one of the great American novelists. Foregone is a book about not coming to a conclusion. Banks presents us with a series of mirrors, some of them broken, some of them intact, and all of them wildly reflective of our times. It is a book about the shifting shapes of memory and the chimerical nature of our lives.”

– Colum McCann

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Russell at The Calabash International Literary Festival founded in 2001 by three Jamaicans—producer Justine Henzell, Festival Founder and Artistic Director, the novelist Colin Channer (l), the poet Kwame Dawes (r). Their aim was to create a world-class literary festival with roots in Jamaica and branches reaching out into the wider world.

“Walk Good, Russell Banks. You were a gracious friend and an advocate for Calabash, gracing our stage in 2005 and again in 2010. We will miss you deeply.”

THE BOOK OF JAMAICA by Russell Banks Here is an account of Mr. Banks reading at Calabash Literary Festival from Mi Yard Cyber Club Message Board, “Another Good book about Jamaica” Date: Russell Banks, American literary giant, was the keynote reader on Saturday and given one hour to read. Banks is the author of fifteen works of fiction including The Book of Jamaica, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling. He has also written several short story collections, including “The Angel on the Roof.” Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, have been made into award-winning motion pictures.

In the seventies, Banks lived in Jamaica for a time, which was the inspiration for his novel, The Book of Jamaica, the fictional account of a white American, Johnny, and his friend, “Rasta,” living in the Accommpong area of cockpit country. Banks chose a passage from the book, noting that he had never previously read publicly from this book but that finally he had the proper audience to appreciate it.

His selected passage was the account of Johnny and Rasta arriving at midnight in an eastern Maroon Village to carry the village elders to Accompong, the western Maroon Village for a historic meeting to reconcile differences between the two communities. Significantly, the meeting will take place on January 6th as the Maroons celebrate their historic victory over the British which led to their freedom.

The chapter vividly describes the Colonel, in a lime green leisure suit; his wife, in what appears to be an old formal taffeta wedding dress; Cecelia, the community “singer,” also dressed in formal taffeta evening wear; and various other community members crowding into Johnny’s van, accompanied by drums, luggage, food baskets and more. Ten minutes later, the van has still not left the yard as the “ceremonies” have not finished: cow horn blow, white rum spit upon the ground, drums beat, and finally Cecelia sings a song of safe travel. At last they are off, but not for long, as they pass the first rum shop, the first of many stops occur to share white rum and to tell all present of the purpose of the trip. The crowd reacted with laughter and applause as the chapter ended with the safe arrival of the eastern Maroons in Accompong the next day.

Though Banks’ time was up, cries of “forward” by the audience and Calabash organizers alike, resulted in an encore, this time a short story The Moor, which describes a chance meeting in a restaurant of a fifty’ish man with his former lover from thirty years previous, now celebrating her 80th birthday. – By Georgiajan 3/30/10 Mr. Banks has an uncanny talent of describing the sometimes comical and always complex nuances of life in Jamaica. – By Rebecca

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Reasoning with Linton Kwesi-Johnson at Jack Sprat in Jamaica. “Jack Sprat is a real melting pot of people: you can meet Treasure Beach policemen, students, the local mayor and visitors from almost any country in the world. There’s always great music playing, dominos and ludi on the table, album art from classic ska, reggae, and dance records hang on the walls and there’s a great rum bar.” —JASON HENZEL, Prop.

“...the popular music of Jamaica, the music of the people, is an essentially experiential music... the music reflects the historical experience.”

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

Calabash Festival 2005

“The Fire Is Lit”

By BIGGARASTA Treasure Beach, Jamaica: LKJ’s strong bearing, top hat and tie —his mere presence—commanded attention. He began with several poems from Mi Revolushanary Fren, published in Pengiun’s Modern Classics series, only the second living poet and first black poet to do so.

His performance was perfectly cadenced, rhythmic, as he painted vivid pictures with his words. Loud applause accompanied his annoucing he would read Sonny’s Letter, often called Mama, a poignant letter home from England where Sonny is imprisoned and trying to explain circumstances to his mother back home. With little chatter between poems, he let his poetry speak for itself, and it came through loud and clear.

When the program came to a close, the crowd was on its feet cheering for more.....and more was given.

By 10:30 a screen had been set up on stage for a late night showing of The Harder They Come, outdoors under the stars. Of course, most of the audience knew all the songs, and many seemed to know the dialog throughout. Perry Henzell, author and co-director, was in attendance as was Trevor Rhone, co-director and actor.

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Linton Kwesi Johnson Ausable Press book cover

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Mi Revalueshanary Fren

Following is the Russell Banks introduction to Linton Kwesi-Johnson’s riveting, memorable and astounding book of poetry.

An international Jamaican superstar, LKJ is a top notch reggae band unto himself. His poetry thunders, soothes and incites.

Peter Tosh meets John Lee Hooker. Published by Ausable Press, Chase Twichell, publisher, the book includes a CD of the poet reading his work—a powerful recital of 14 poems from this volume. Spectacular on all fronts.

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art. It links one’s secret solitary self to the secret solitary self of another and from that other to the species; it is the antithesis of solipsism, the negation of narcissism. As my friend, the late poet William Matthews, used to say, “Sorry, Narcissus, there is someone else.” And the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—or LKJ, as he’s known to much of the world—confirms it. In “If I Woz a TapNatch Poet” Johnson says he’d write us a poem “soh dyam deep / dat it bittah-sweet / like a precious / memari / whe mek yu weep / whe mek yu feel incomplete.”

He is, of course, a top-notch poet, and his bitter-sweet poems can indeed make us weep, make us feel incomplete. In 2002 he became the second living and the first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a “patois,” either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from 17th century British English and West African, mostly Ashanti, language groups, with a lexical admixture from the Caribe and Arawak natives of the island. It

ake the title, Mi Revalueshanary Fren, and silently say it, and hear yourself saying it. Then open the book at random to any one of these extraordinary poems, and do the same. Say the poem, and hear yourself saying it. You’ll have answered the question that most contemporary English language readers, accustomed as they are to reading poetry strictly with their eyes instead of with their ears and mouths, might otherwise have shyly (or perhaps defensively) asked themselves, How best to read this work? The answer should be obvious, I suppose. For thousands of years human beings have best experienced poetry as song. What we happen to see printed on paper (or inscribed on vellum, papyrus or clay tablet) merely cues our ears and mouths, and if it’s good poetry, we hear music and sing a song not of our own making.

More than nearly any other contemporary English-language poet (I’ll come back to that categorization in a moment), Linton Kwesi Johnson writes poems that make us sing with a voice that mingles our intimate own with a stranger’s, the poet’s, intimate own. And inasmuch as the poet is a representative man or woman (and Johnson is indeed one, a true people’s poet), we end up singing a people’s song. Poetry, at its best, is the most humanizing 44

“Poetry, at its best, is the most humanizing art.”

I was writing about, namely the black community ... I wanted to write oral poetry that could hold the interest of the reader as well as the listener. I heard music in language and I wanted to write word-music, verse anchored by the one-drop beat of reggae with meter measured by the bass line or a drum pattern; I wanted to write lines that sound like a bass line.”

For these purposes, Jamaican creole was the ideal, perhaps the only, language. And the rich Jamaican oral tradition, steeped in folk songs and Anancy tales, rhyming games and riddles, religious songs and proverbs and, of course, the King James Bible, became his mother-lode of imagery and marmative structure and intent.

A home-grown music, a mother-tongue, and a mother-lode: one could do worse, one could not do much better.

It’s also useful to know that Johnson “came to poetry through politics.” the politics of black liberation in England and America in the late 1960s and 1970s. Like most Afro-Caribbean intellectuals of his generation, he had to step outside the university and the English literary canon in order to encounter the work of writers whose experiences of race and racism corresponded to his own.

He joined the British Black Panthers, and through the Panthers he discovered and then began to explore the vast continent of literature by black authors about black people—at that time a subterranean literature, by and large, even in America. Trained in sociology, he eagerly devoured the writings of W. E. B. Dubois and C. L. R. James, but one book from that period was of special eye- and ear-opening importance to him, as it was to so manv of us: Black Poetry, edited by Dudley Randall, published in 1969

by Broadside Press. There he read for the first time the poems of Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, as well as his near-contemporaries, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Later, under the guidance of the older Jamaican poet, Andrew Salkey, then living in England, and in the pages of Caribbean journals like Sankou and BIM, and in the publications and on the shelves of the late John La Rose’s and Sarah White’s publishing house and bookshop, New Beacon Books, he immersed himself in the poetry of Caribbean writers like Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite.

One can sense the presence of all these writers and influences in Johnson’s work and often even locate it exactly in this poem or that. And yet he is like no one else writing today. There is a ludic quality to the language and structure of his poems, a determined, ironic playfulness that cuts against the rage and grief that brings the poet to write in the first place. Whether it’s a ballad (Inglan Is a Bitch) or a dramatic monologue (Sonny’s Lettah) or an elegy (the four Reggae fi ... poems), or a poem that brings us the news from the street like a ten-penny broadside tacked to a post (Street 66, Five Nights of Bleeding, New Craas Massakah\”), the poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson are as redemptive and life-affirming as the blues.

is a powerfully expressive, flexible and, not surprisingly, musical vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendants of those slaves, including those who, like LKJ, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada, and the United States. Fortunately, its grammar and orthography, like that of pre-18th century British English, have never been rigidly formalized or fixed by an academy of notables or any authoritative dictionary. It is, therefore, a living, organically evolving language, intimately connected to the lived experience of its speakers.

Looking for an English literary context, critics have sometimes compared Johnson to John Clare, presuming perhaps a similarly provincial naiveté, which at best misreads him and at worst condescends. When I read him, however, I hear the great Renaissance song-poets like Skelton, Wyatt and Herrick, many of whose poems were set to music and meant to be performed; I hear the Caledonian folk music of Robert Burns, and note the linguistic parallels in relation to British English between Burns’ Gaelic brand of English and LKJ’s Jamaican creole. One thinks of Emily Dickinson, who, for the sub-strata of her poems, relied on the metrics and diction of those old New England Protestant hymns. Or one is reminded of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka and Michael Harper in their dedicated use of the modalities of the blues and jazz. Among recent English-language poets one might compare him to Paul Muldoon who, no surprise, is Irish, not English, has written opera libretti and is a part-time rock musician, and whose poems, like LKJ’s, touch us quickest when read with ear and mouth. The point is that, from the 16th century forward, poets writing in every available variant of the English language have had easy access to a rich tradition that is underwritten, as it were, by music; and it’s in this tradition, certainly not the romantic pastoral, that I would place LKJ. In LKJ’s case, the music that underwrites his poetry is reggae. Literally, as well as literarily. Though he is known world-wide as a recording and performing reggae musician and dub-poet and can fill a stadium, the music, he says, “was not only a vehicle to take my verse to a wider audience but was organic to it, was born of it.” I first heard his name back in the late 1970s when I was living in Jamaica, and reggae was just beginning its conquest of the world music scene, and LKJ was a prominent member of the London-based cadre of Jamaican reggae artists. He was known as one of the first, and is surely still one of the best, dub-poets, and may in fact have coined the term in an article he wrote in 1977 in Race Today, where he says, “‘Dub-lyricism’ is a new form of (oral) music-poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on the rhythm background of a popular song.” But he wrote poctry for the page as well, and unbeknownst to me had published books before he began making records, and had made several important strictly literary decisions that he has hewed to ever since “wanted to write poetrv that was accessible to those whose experiences

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Pictured above: John Huttlinger, Russell Banks, Artistic Director Kathleen Carroll, Nelson Page, Naj Wikoff

“We would drink wine and stand out there on the pier and mingle with the folks who made the movies we were about to see, and that’s always fun.”

By SABRINA ALI

This interview originally appeared online at www.lakeplacid.com, used by permission Writer and Adirondack local Russell Banks is known for his empathetic, emotionally complex novels portraying rural life, like The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, both adapted to screenplays. He has had a prolific career as a writer and a professor at such schools as Princeton, and has made the Adirondacks his home. His love of film and the Adirondacks led him to become a pioneering founder of the Lake Placid Film Festival, which is now a five day celebration filled with panels, parties, and of course, great films that you can’t see anywhere else in the region.

Banks was honored for his contributions to the festival at the 2019 Tribute Gala which kicks off the festival in October.

I spoke to Banks on the phone about his role in the Lake Placid Film Festival as it approaches its nineteenth year. During our discussion, we talked about the early days of the festival, the pleasure of seeing a good movie on the big screen, and Banks’ relationship to the Adirondacks.

SA: What is your relationship to the Lake Placid Film Festival?

RB: It’s evolved over the years. I was one of the initiators of it way back when, 19 years ago. It grew out of the screening of a film adaptation of one of my novels called The Sweet Hereafter made by Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Atom agreed to do a premier of the film in Lake Placid at the lovely little Palace Theatre downtown. It was in the middle of the winter and so many people came out to see it. It was a kind of a celebratory local event. It was significant enough that several of us here—Naj Wikoff, Kathleen Carroll, and I—said it would be fun and that this would be a great place to have a little film festival. We can do it! There’s enough interest and people here who care about film.

The Sweet Hereafter is a serious film. It went on to be very successful. It was nominated for Academy Awards and won at Cannes. We could do serious films here, have panels, make an educational aspect to it, and bring in filmmakers, actors, and screenwriters and have a really good time. And so we did. That was the beginning. Kathleen, Naj, and I then brought Nelson Page in and a few other people, all working through local businesses and institutions. But, most importantly the Palace Theatre hosted us. They have three screens and then we added a screen over at Lake Placid Center for the Arts. We had the first year the following June and brought people like Atom Egoyan and Paul Schrader who brought in other people. Martin Scorsese came. Norman Jewison came. Some of the great filmmakers of our time showed up.

It really took off from there.

We created a board and I acted with Kathleen Carroll as a creative advisor. Our role was to find the films and use our Rolodex to call and locate friends, associates and colleagues in the film business and talk them into coming up to show their films here. Over the years I stayed involved in that capacity for about ten years or so. Then I was too busy and had to do my own writing so I pulled back and took on a more informal capacity as a creative advisor, but I have stayed attached to it ever since.

SA: What do you think this festival has contributed to the Adirondack region over the years?

RB: A number of important things. One is that we have introduced to the region and to the people of the region the work and personalities, and the physical and intellectual presence, of serious filmmakers and films they would not have seen otherwise or have heard discuss their work, up close and personal.

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I have been to several film festivals and served on juries—at Sundance and elsewhere—and you don’t get to be up close and personal with the people there who you want to talk to and to sit down and have a coffee with. That was possible here, partly due to the size. Lake Placid is small enough and when people got here that was the atmosphere that we all tried to create—informal, personal, and casual. You might have Willem Dafoe walking down Main Street but it wasn’t any kind of big deal, and that was great fun. It was important, useful, and educational for local folks and [those who] came from very far away to attend.

Another thing we did, and have continued to do, was try to bring and engage young filmmakers—students and beginning filmmakers— through panel discussions with older, more established figures. We also had a number of colleges bring a team and they would have 48 hours to make their own film. It was a contest. It was very popular and engaged college kids from as far away as Emerson in Boston, New York City, and Concordia in Montreal all sent teams down at one time. Then St. Lawrence and University of Vermont in Burlington did so. There was this outreach towards youth and the young filmmakers that tend to work in isolation, especially if you are in a college that is not Manhattan or Los Angeles. [This] was an important thing we brought over the years to the region.

Then, there’s how [the festival] affects the world on the outside. It makes [the place] visible. Lake Placid, of course, is mainly known and visible to the outside world because of the Olympics and the sports events that take place here, and not because of the arts that take place.

But, there is a tremendous amount of art that comes out of this region and a tremendous amount of interest and involvement with the arts.

This event put a focus on the cinematic aspects of that. We tend to look at other places, like Woodstock or even Burlington and Brattleboro, as though there’s a lot of arts going on down over there. Well, there’s a lot of arts going on here too, and it doesn’t quite get the same amount of attention because we have the glaring light of the Olympics that kind of deflects from it.

There was an economic impact [of the festival] too because a lot of people were coming into the town from elsewhere and staying over for a few days who might not otherwise come here, who would have gone to Woodstock to that festival, or would have gone somewhere else rather than all the way up here. So, there was an economic benefit to it for the town. Restaurants and hotels were filled.

SA: What are your favorite moments/stories that stand out to you from throughout the years?

RB: There are lots of them. It’s a kaleidoscope of memories and images. One of the things that was so satisfying for me personally—because I wrote a novel based on the life of John Brown and the John Brown Farm is right here in North Elba—was when Martin Scorsese came up to spend the weekend. We got talking about John Brown and he knew my novel. He had read it, in fact, and was really fascinated by it. He said to me, “What do you mean, John Brown’s buried right here?” I said, “Yeah, you want to know where John Brown’s body lies moldering; it lies moldering in North Elba, New York!”

He said, “I want to see it! I want to go there!” So, he had a car take us over to John Brown’s farm and gravesite. That was one of the most pleasant and interesting afternoons in my life, really. I was walking through the farm with Martin Scorsese and his rat-a-tat-tat questioning about Brown, and the people with him, and why they were all buried here, and how long had he lived here. Luckily, I had the answers to most of his questions. It was a great little connection. It was important for him and certainly important for me. It connected an important aspect of our little town to the great big larger world of Martin Scorsese. Things like that were fun and enjoyable.

I remember going with Willem Dafoe into a local restaurant and there was a huge crowd, but nobody recognized him if you can believe that. He’s pretty recognizable, but except for one waitress who had such a crush on him. It was so sweet and funny because he’s a very gracious man. She could barely speak, but she managed to find us a table in this huge crowd and got us in the corner and took great care of us. I saw that kind of thing happening over and over again because everybody who came up here was really gracious to the local folks who were sometimes a little in awe of them, as people do around celebrities and movie stars. It’s like running into a angel or something.

There were some great films. We always had a silent film which was a wonderful aspect to the festival. We would sit out at the Boathouse on Mirror Lake and we had opening receptions that were always really enjoyable and pleasant if the weather was good—and we were lucky because it usually was. We would drink wine and stand out there on the pier and mingle with the folks who made the movies we were about to see, and that’s always fun.

SA: How do you feel film and the region has inspired your craft? You have had a very long career and writers change over time, so where you are at the beginning I am sure is very different from where you are now as a writer.

RB: I have had a house up here for over 30 years, since 1987. Almost immediately the region—the place—inspired me, and my work took a swerve. The place became central to my work, with some short stories first and then the novel The Sweet Hereafter, which is set up here and then Cloudsplitter, which is based on the life of John Brown and a big chunk of that was set up here. So, it became a location for me and its history, its political life, its economic life, and the physical presence of the place really took over a big part of my work starting in 1987 or so.

I grew up in New Hampshire in the 1940s and I came here following my wife. Her family had been up here for generations, and so I came here because of a woman, which I guess there are worse reasons to go some place! But, I came here because of her and when I got here I realized this is so much like where I grew up and when I grew up in the 1940s. There was a quality of life and a physical presence to the place that was immediately familiar to me, and yet here it was very contemporary at the same time. This is not a lost-in-time place, but it brought me back to my childhood and it had a very salubrious, imaginative power for me and in my life, and therefore in my work.

SA: Do you have movie recommendations for us today? What is something you are looking forward to watching?

RB: That’s an interesting and hard question to answer from up here. That’s one problem up here, and that’s one the film festival helps deal with. It’s very hard to see any films up here except for the two or three blockbuster films that come out from the major studios. If you like serious films, it’s hard. I’m waiting to see two films, both of which Willem Dafoe is in. One is called The Lighthouse. I can’t remember the name of the other one. One was at Cannes, and the other is about to come out. They look and sound fantastic, but I am going to have to wait until the fall, or until they show up streaming to see them.

That is a problem that is going on in the film industry right now. If you like independent films, artistic films—serious films is what I guess we call them—and you are not that interested in action movies or adaptations of Marvel comics and things like that, or animated films, then you have to travel or else you have to wait until you can stream it. But that’s an industry problem, not just a regional problem. It is a regional problem because it is an industry problem. If the Palace Theatre could show those films they would, and I wouldn’t have to wait 47

PHOTO COURTESY NAJ WIKOFF

to see them on my small screen. I could see it on the big screen. But, the way the industry is changing and the way it has over the last few years—and it will get even more radical over the next few years—it’s really hard to see serious, good films in any semi-rural or rural area of the country. I can’t even do that in Saratoga Springs. There isn’t an arthouse type theater in Saratoga. I have to go to New York, Boston, or Miami to see a serious film.

SA: The Palace is so great. It’s this small, old theater and it would be so perfect to have independent art films. I wonder if they have the capacity to show these films.

RB: But, also, they are restricted by the distributors. They can’t contract those films. There was a piece in The New York Times about a conflict regarding Martin Scorsese, actually, and his new film that has been financed by Netflix. He wants it seen on the big screen and Netflix is restricting that. The big screen distributors require or insist upon a 90 day—3 months—screening time availability and Netflix won’t provide that so Scorsese is caught in the middle of a fight.

SA: I have been thinking about the significance of going to the theater, and many writers have written about how special it is to be inside a movie theater. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’ essay on going to and leaving the movie theater. It’s a classic essay. It’s so special being inside a theater.

RB: Oh yeah! It’s a quasi-religious experience in a sense that you’re in a community but you’re alone at the same time. It’s communal and it’s private. There is nothing quite like it. It’s not the same if you are at home at your desk and looking at it on your iPad or whatever.

SA: Is there any last thing you’d like to share about the Lake Placid Film Festival? What should we know?

RB: One of the nicest things about working with these folks over the years is that it’s been a collaborative experience. We’ve all had different roles at different times, and it’s shifted over time. But, it’s an incredibly cooperative and collaborative group of people. It couldn’t have been done otherwise. It’s never been a one man or one woman show. It’s always been a group that’s put it together.

I work alone as a writer. I don’t work with other people, and it’s a very isolated kind of work. But, working with these folks on the Lake Placid Film Festival has really been extremely satisfying for me. It’s one of the few things that I do in collaboration with other people.

SA: The thing about writers and writing is that you do just have to be alone. There’s no way around it. You could have as many writing groups as you want, but in order to get the thing done you have to isolate yourself.

RB: Yes, nobody else can do it.

SA: I often joke with my friends that I wish I were a filmmaker or dancer, so that I could work with other people. There’s a reason I’m doing this, but I feel like the world of filmmaking is so special.

RB: It’s very seductive and compelling.

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PHOTO COURTESY NAJ WIKOFF

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

– JACKIE ROBINSON

“A genius is the one most like himself.”

– THELONIUS MONK

“The most powerful writing comes from confronting taboos.”

– JOYCE CAROL OATES

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”

– KURT VONNEGUT 49

“A remarkable man. Russell Banks meant much to many. To me he was a mentor, advocate and friend. He passed away peacefully last night. I treasure the tent time we spent together in the Andes and our walks and conversations together in the Adirondacks. I feel honored to have been your friend.”

– Matthew Horner “Matt is a beast, an animal, an extreme mountain-man. I’ve climbed with him in the Andes in Ecuador and Peru, and have felt a lot safer because of it. I’m nearly 40 years older than he is, and my wife wouldn’t let me go until I assured her that Matt would be my tent-mate, and if I had a heart attack at altitude, he would carry me out, so she relented, because she believed, rightly, that he is my only friend who is capable of carrying me out. He’s also a fine artist, a deep soul with a vision. How rare is that?

I love the guy.”

– Russell Banks

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Ecuador, photo by Matthew Horner

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Peru, photo by Matthew Horner 53

In Ecuador with Tom Healy, one of Russell’s closest friends and climbing buddies, photo by Matthew Horner 54

SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY ISSUE FEATURING ADIRONDACK ARTISTS ✪ SALLINGER’S ODE TO THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL ✪ RUSSELL BANKS OPERA • ROLF SCHULTE

SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY EDITION 2019 • $15

ADIRONDACKS PHOTO OF GOTHICS BY ROLF SCHULTE, COURTESY A POINT OF VIEW GALLERY

MATTHEW HORNER & ,RUSSELL BANKS ON THE ROAD

SMALL AXE @HEAVEN’S DOOR

MIKE KAZ @KEENE ARTS

BRUCE MITCHELL

SIX NATIONS INDIAN MUSEUM

SUE YOUNG’S MOSAIC

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HARMONY

Russell Banks and Robert Carl Create Mozartian Romance

Samuel Clemens photographed in 1908 via the Autochrome Lumiere process

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By Robert Carl

he origins of Harmony have an element The origins of Harmony an element of serendipity.

I had beenhave thinking of the of serendipity.

I had been thinking the idea of a small music theater pieceofabout idea of a small music theater piece about the meeting of Mark Twain and Charles the of Markhappened Twain and Charles Ives,meeting which actually in Hartford Ives, which actually happened in Hartford Connecticut prior to Ives’s marriage (Twain Connecticut prior toof Ives’s marriage (Twain was the godfather Harmony Twichell, was the godfather of Harmony Twichell, Ives’s fiancée). But when reading the Ives’s novel fiancée).

ButBone whenbyreading theBanks, novel Rule of Rule of the Russell I came the Bone by Russell Banks, I came to realize to realize that this writer, whom I already that this enormously, writer, whom already admired in Ifact had aadmired similar enormously, in fact had a similar interest in interest in both artistic figures. (The book both artistic figures.

(The book is a modern is a modern retelling of Huckleberry Finn, retelling of Huckleberry Finn,Ives and scattered there are and there are clues about clues about Ives scattered throughout it.) And throughout it.) And as it turned out later, as it turned out later, Russell was married to Russell was married to Ives’ grand niece, the Ives’ grand niece, the poet Chase Twichell poet Chase Twichell … and they summered …and in same area “camp” as the in samethey area summered as the Twichells’ summer Twichells’ summer “camp” that Ives visited! that Ives visited!

And so I did the hard copy equivalent of a “cold call“, writing Russell, who amazingly responded. This began a process which led to the formulation of the initial story, and the transposition of its locale to the far more beautiful and romantic Adirondacks. The first stage of our adventure was a reading of an extended concert excerpt at the New York City Opera Vox series. And happily, though I did not know it at the time, Darren Woods was in the audience. He later contacted us in hopes that Seagle could produce the premiere of the piece, a perfect match, since its location is very close to that of the work’s setting.

Harmony has been a labor of love for both of us for almost 2 decades. I think it is particularly special for a few reasons. First, it is a romantic comedy, 10 • Fine Art Magazine Adirondack • Autumn 2019

Charles Ives, daughter Edith, 1924

Though Ives composed the first radical musical work of the twentieth century, “Central Park in the Dark”, his music was largely ignored during his life, particularly during the years in which he actively wrote music. and I personally think there aren’t enough of those around in opera (never mind that the gold standard was established early on by Mozart’s great late operas).

Second, it is a truly original story. So many operas have recently been musical re-workings of movies, plays, and novels.

This one comes out of the joint experience and inspiration of Russell and me, and in particular out of his fertile and fluent literar y imagination and voice.

Third, it is diverse and eclectic in a very American way. Its time and topic allows the incorporation of sounds that come out of hymnody, folk song, popular music of the day, traditional classical music, and avant-garde practice: 56

Charles Ives, c. 1909

aa little likethethe music ofhimself.

Ives himself. little like music of Ives (Though (Though I have avoided making theapiece of I have avoided making the piece pastiche pastiche of his music).

Its setting, in 1908, is of his music). Its setting, in 1908, is poised poised at a moment in music history when at a moment in music history when anything anything was possible; a time that is not very was possible; a time that is not very different different from ours at the turn of this century. from ours at the turn of this century.

Finally, it’s a story of how artists struggle to maintain love in the face of the often punishing ideals of their work. And it’s also a story of the people “behind the scenes” (especially the women) who keep things together, rescue artists from their extremities, and allow vision to flourish. I’ve thought of it as a bit of an all-American Magic Flute, set in the mountains. Often in the pursuit of perfection or the transcendental, things can get derailed. And then, through the power of love, life can be set back on track for the happiness and welfare of all.

AtAtKeene Seagle Music MusicColony Colonyworkshop workshopperformance performance KeeneArts Arts for for the the Seagle of of Harmony: Malcolm MacDougall, sculptor Matthew “Harmony”: Malcolm MacDougall, sculptor Matthew Horner,Horner, artist Frank artist Frank Lee Owen Owen,Owen, RussellRussell Banks, Banks, realtor realtor Martha Martha Lee Owen

L top R: Richard Kagey (Seagle Production director), Russell Banks, Alicia Russell (Harmony Twichell), Darren Woods (Seagle Artistic Director), Andrew McGowan (Dr. David Twichell), Tom Lynch (Charles Ives), Robert Carl (Music Composer), Anthony Rohr (Mark Twain) Megan Dieter (Seagle Stage director), Katarina Galagaza (Olivia Twain & Julia Twichell), Nate Mattingly (Rev. Joseph Twichell), Neil Campbell (Music Director) at Keene Arts performance of “Harmony” Workshop performance by American Center for New Works Development by Seagle Music Colony, Elizabethtown, NY

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

by Russell Banks

There was an extraordinary night in America in 1908, when the greatest American writer of the 19th century, the elderly Mark Twain, was in the same room with the greatest American composer of the 20th, the young Charles Ives. I know about this meeting because of my wife’s family history. Her great-grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Twichell, minister of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, CT, was both the best friend and longtime traveling companion of Mark Twain and the father of Harmony Twichell, who was his favorite daughter and Twain’s god-daughter. The young Ives had come a-courting and wanted the hand of Harmony, and Rev. Twichell asked Twain to interview the young man to determine if he was fit for the hand of Harmony. This took place in Hartford. I wrote an essay about the event as an introduction to one of the volumes of the Oxford facsimile edition of the Complete Mark Twain, for which a number of contemporary American authors were invited to introduce individual volumes. I chose Twain’s A Tramp Abroad, Twain’s account of his trek through Germany, Switzerland and Italy with a figure named, Mr. Harris, who is a thinly disguised portrait of Rev. Twichell, who made that trip with him. The essay was published separately in The New York Times Book Review. Sometime after that appeared, the composer Robert Carl, who had come to my fiction separately and knew thereby of my interest in both Ives and Twain, asked me if this fascinating encounter between Ives and Twain could be an opera, and would I be willing to write the libretto.

I had never written a libretto before, though I am a lifelong opera lover and have read many libretti, ancient and modern. But I wrote poetry as a young man and published several volumes of it in the 1960s and -70s, and Robert Carl’s suggestion took me back to that early period in my writing life, before I turned to fiction, and presented me with the opportunity to re-engage my love both of verse and opera. I admire Robert Carl’s music, especially the work he has done with poets like Charles Simic and other writers. So I agreed to write a libretto based on that wonderful, little known night in America in 1908. Together we met and discussed how to adapt the historical events to the necessary narrative elements of opera, how to play the characters off one another and develop them over time — narrative elements — and how to present this wonderful meeting both dramatically and musically.

We decided that it should take place on a midsummer’s eve in the Adirondack summer home of the Twichell family, visited often by both Twain and Ives, and it should be a Mozartian romance, in which the romantic dreams of youth are played out against the restraints and fears of the sagacious and cautious elderly. And it should dramatize the conflict between a life dedicated to art and one constrained by domestic affiliation. That Rev. Twichell had nine children gave us the chorus. That the late Twain was still embittered over the loss of his wife Olivia and the death of two of his children gave us an antagonist. That Charles Ives at that young age was beginning to suffer from the effects of diabetes, a fatal disease then, gave us the dark shadow needed to make our story dramatic.

For me, returning to verse was liberating. I was able to combine my fiction-writer’s devotion to story and character and conflict with my love of language and music in a new way, but one that re-connected me to my early love of writing poetry. It also let me memorialize a Twichell family story that had been told to me by my wife and her extended Twichell family for decades. And it let me sing a hymn to my own personally beloved Adirondacks, where this all takes place on a single evening. Which happens to be one of the most interesting evenings in the history of American art.

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Fine Art Magazine Adirondack • Autumn 2019 • 11

PAUL MATTHEWS MEMORIAL JULY 27, 2019, KEENE, NY In his Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as Other Traditions, the poet John Ashbury wondered “if we really know who our greatest artists are.” He was speaking of certain poets who for reasons unrelated to the quality or nature of their work, remain less celebrated or well- known than they deserve.

Despite the prevailing fashion of their times, they went their own way and stayed true to their hard won vision for a lifetime and produced a body of work that could and perhaps should be regarded as great. In the world of American portraiture and landscape painting, our beloved friend and neighbor, Paul Matthews, was such an artist.

In celebrating his life today, let us not forget how fortunate we have been all these years to have had a Great Artist living and working among us. That fact can get lost sometimes, because we have been hanging out with the Great Artist at the Ausable Inn, bumping into him on Saturday at the dump or Stewarts for The New York Times on his way home or Sunday at the Farmers’ Market. I imagine the 17th century residents of Amsterdam sometimes forgot that their friend and neighbor, Rembrandt Van Rijn, who they just passed in the tulip market or knocked back a lager with at the Dockside Tavern, happened also to be a Great Artist.

So in that mixture of light and shadow, in that Rembrandtian chiaroscuro, let’s reflect for a few moments on what, with Paul’s passing, we have lost, and what remains.

When a beloved friend dies, we don’t just lose a companion in life, we lose a witness to our life, a vital memory of our life, one who helps validate and confirm the meaningful nature of our otherwise mostly insignificant passage here on earth. When that friend is a great artist we lose a special kind of witness, one who through his art possesses a unique ability to give profound value to the worth of our solitary, private, subjective experience of reality. Take, for instance, our experience of this very valley and the mountains and sky that surround it and the rivers and streams that run through it. How many times have we said, when otherwise at an utter loss for words, “That’s a Paul Matthews sky”?

Or stunned into inarticulateness on a July afternoon by the view of the Great Range from Nun-da-Gao, said in wonder, “It looks like a Matthews.” His paintings make it possible for us to remain essentially silent and awestruck and respectful before the sacred nature of light and shadow, the transcendent beauty of the natural world.

Or consider the validating effect of his portraiture. Paul’s portraits of his friends and family members — real and sometimes wholly imagined, male and female, young

and old, clothed and unclothed, dignified or silly, erotic or beautifully pregnant, in the full swagger of patriarchal power or weakened by age and illness — consider how they have let us view each other with Paul’s same tenderness and affection and lack of judgement, his unadulterated adoration of the human body and face. His portraits, in the best sense of the word, humanize the viewer.

We thethe world that surrounds us, and Weview view world that surrounds we view each other and therefore ourselves, us, and we view each other and therefore differently and with greater depth and clarity ourselves, differently and with greater depth and love than we would if Paul had notifcome and clarity and love than we would Paul here with here Leliawith andLelia their and family tofamily live and not come their to work among But us. there another, often live and work us. among Butisthere is another, overlooked gift that comes with having often overlooked gift that comes with havinga Great Artist as a friend and neighbor.

That a Great Artist as a friend and neighbor. gift is the example he provides with his That gift is the example he provides with commitment to work, a commitment renewed his commitment to work, a commitment daily seven days a week renewed daily seven daysyear-round. a week year-round.

Nothing great is accomplished part time or seasonally. One doesn’t become a Great Artist, or a Great Anything, merely on the basis of talent or intelligence or education. It takes a lifetime’s work. And as a result it demands a certain amount of sacrifice, socially, financially, even physically.

This is useful perhaps especially to those of us who will never become a Great Artist or a Great Anything. Paul’s lifelong dedication to work can serve as an object lesson to the rest of us. We see the price he paid, and it lets us decide if we ourselves are willing to pay it.

Whenever I visited Paul’s studio up the hill on Hurricane a few miles from mine, and saw there the dozens of newly completed and half-finished and justconceived paintings and sketches, and the

10 • Fine Art Magazine Adirondack • Autumn 2019

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“Umber Self-Portrait,” Oil on board, 16 x 14”, 1971

“Russell’s Doppelganger,” Oil on canvas, 40” x 32”, 2008

notes and clippings and photos pinned to the wall as ideas for possible future work, and talked with him about his progress on one or another of his writing projects, his memoirs, poems, maybe someday a novel…, I would hurry back down the hill to my own studio and get quickly back to work.

For many of us, perhaps for most of us here today — certainly for me — Paul was an example and an inspiration. A Great Artist, yes. A companion, a friend, and a neighbor.

A testifying witness to the transcendent mystery of the beauty of the natural world and a guide whose work furthers my love of my fellow beings. And though he has been taken from our daily lives, his work and his spirit and inspiration remain.

–Russell Banks

With Dan Plumley of the Keene Fire Department at reception following Paul Matthews memorial at Keene Arts. On this Memorial Day, it was a “solemn occasion,” said Dan. Dave Deyo in background.

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PHOTO BY JAMIE ELLIN FORBES

Russell Banks and Alex Shoumatoff at Keene Valley’s Mountaineer book festival, 2012 where they displayed and signed their books along with local authors Phil Brown, Chase Twichell, Paul Matthews, Jerry Jenkins, Wynant Vanderpoel, Rebecca Foster, Victor Forbes, Bill McKibben, Willem Lange, Harry Groome, Betsy Thomas-Train, Roger Mitchell, Tom Smith and Carl Heilman

Alex Shoumatoff – “Thank you, Russell” I first became aware of Russell Banks in the early eighties, when the editor-in-chief of Harper and Row, Ed Burlingame, gave me a copy of his novel Continental Drift. I was writing for the New Yorker and was having artistic problems with its stylistic prissiness, and Russell’s red-blooded, vernacular writing was like a breath of fresh air. His editor, Ted Solotaroff, became the editor of my book on the Southwest, and Russell became a friend, and eventually his agent, Ellen Levine, became my agent.

I bought 40 acres in the Adirondacks and built a log cabin on them, then Russell and his new wife, Chase Twichell, bought a place down the road, so we saw more of each other. Russell would bring up interesting people—major talents—to meet me and take in the magnificent view of Mount Marcy from our deck: Willem Dafoe, Raoul Peck, Paul Schrader, Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani.

He taught a course on Bohemians of the Adirondacks at SUNY Plattsburgh, one of whom was me, and provided blurbs for many of my books. At one point, when we had moved up to Montréal and I was over-extended trying to educate my five boys and while maintaining two properties, he even loaned me ten thousand bucks. Never in the history of our relationship did he ask me for anything.

In the last few years, Russell and I and Frank Owen, and, while he was still alive, Paul Matthews, would kick off the summer with a boozy dinner at the Ausable Inn. He was incredibly fit. At the age of 78 he climbed a 20,000-foot peak in Ecuador, and biked a couple of hours a day, thinking nothing of taking off for a few days to bike around Lake Champlain. He seemed to get stronger and more vibrant, his visage more hoary and noble, as he entered his eighties. So I was shattered to learn that he had been smitten with the Big C— leukemia and throat cancer at the same time. He was a major figure in American letters and did a lot of good for a lot of 60

Alex on stage at Keene Arts opening for The Slickers reggae band kown for thier song “Johnny Too Bad” on “The Harder They Come” movie soundtrack. That song was featured in the Apple TV documentary “1971: The Year Music Changed Everything.”

“In 1970 I was blown away by a Jimmy Cliff and Brother Joe Higgs concert at Carnegie Hall and went to Jamaica, where my dad and my great-uncle made the definitive collection of the island’s butterflies and moths in the 1930s. There I immersed myself in the music and entered my first tropical rain forest and experienced its riot of life. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair that took me to the Amazon, Africa’s Equatorial Forest and Borneo. A few years later, I met Russell and learned that Jamaica had a seminal influence on his life and writing, too , which he chronicled in his memorable The Book of Jamaica.”

people, not just me, particularly for oppressed and censored writers as a member of the International Parliament of Writers. He was a fierce critic of American racism, which he considered to have “poisoned America’s noble democratic experiment at its roots.” To me, his greatest work was his majesterial, partly fictionalized biography of John Brown, Cloudsplitter.

Of my many memories of this great man and writer, one, from the late nineties, stands out: it was like five below, and Russell and I took off on cross-country skis from the Crow clearing to the Biesemeyer lean-to, then we crossed Gulf Brook and bush-whacked in deep snow along the base of Chase Mountain to the long-abandoned Philosopher’s Camp, where William James, George Santayana, Freud, Adler, Jung and other great thinkers met in the summer and debated the big questions about why we are here and what we should be doing. Suddenly, deep in the forest, we came upon one of the long-abandoned cabins where the philosophers had stayed.

Through one of its windows we could see that it was empty, except for a white-painted cast-iron bed with a thin mattress lying on its springs. It was really creepy, like a ghostly premonition of death. We both shuddered involuntary, and I resolved to write a piece for Adirondack Life called “Creepy Ruins of the Adirondacks.” On Hurricane Road, coming up from Elizabethtown, there was a cliff off to the right with a rusted Model T hanging in the branches of the tall pines below it. I never ended up writing the piece, but I can picture Russell still sitting in his cabin, below his and Chase’s house, cozy and not at all creepy, writing away on his next book and answering the voluminous correspondence with all the people he had touched and connected with and supported. His was a great life, and a great career that will not come close to being repeated.

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Frank Owen and Russell Banks enjoying a moment at the Adirondack Film Society tribute gala honoring the Keene-based author and festival and society co-founder Russell Banks at the High Peaks Resort, 2019. “It’s really not so much a celebration of me as much as it is of the film festival,” Banks said. “They’ve persisted and lasted this long. They bring to this community a kind of film sophistication and intelligence and discrimination that you don’t get in small-town America.” .

Frank Owen “I am touched by the picture.

I have spent several days driving country roads thinking about Russell and his loss.

Many tears have blurred my view.”

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Frank Owen and Russell Banks were great friends, highly accomplished artist and writer. Is it more than a coincidence that the Russell’s acclaimed novel, Cloudsplitter, is narrated as a retrospective by John Brown’s son, Owen? Cloudsplitter centers on Brown’s quest for political change and social justice that culminated in his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry which launched the Civil War.

“His interest in working class people made him a good fit for this community. The climate and types of employment were similar to where he grew up in New Hampshire: his father was a plumber and all that. Russell was open, friendly, interested in people. He was always finding out things, not in an interrogating way but conversationally. The Valley Boyz, he organized that. Thursday afternoons in the summer: beer, peanuts, cheese and crackers, and conversation. There were poets, painters and other creative types. It was always fun. Chase brought him here—her family being here for generations—and he fit right in.”

— FRANK OWEN (as quoted by Naj Wikoff in The Lake Placid News) 63

“Valley Boyz was a group of local male artists, including Frank Owen, George Daniels, Paul Matthews, Roger Mitchell, Tom Hughes and Scott Renderer. Their motto was ‘We never climb.’ I asked my father, who was a Latin teacher, to translate it, and had license plate holders made for them that said ‘Ascendemus Numquam.’

—And it was spelled with a Z. The guy who made the license plate holders got it wrong.” –Chase Twichell

Valley Boyz meet at Frank Owen studio in Keene Valley – Russell, Paul Matthews, Charles Ramsberg, Roger Mitchell and Frank, who supplied the oversize gloves “Russell and I had a lopsided friendship built upon hero worship. Having read his novels, I loved him before meeting him. His camaraderie was loaded with generosity, his intellect razor sharp. Russell welcomed me into his inner circle of Adirondack artists and I will always be grateful for the enormous support and guidance he offered in the making of the Recovery Lounge. I’m pretty sure he’s the smartest man I have ever known. Rest in peace, brother.”

– Scott Renderer 64

From Daniel Halpern: “Our Boyz Group — me, Russell, Stanley Plumly, William Matthews. Friend’s dinner in the 80s.”

Photo by Chase Twichell — “The best picture I ever took. It was at Bill & Arlo’s. I took it with a drugstore camera because I’d forgotten mine.”

Sitting (L. to R.): Jim Harrison, Peter Matthiessen, Guy de la Valdéne; Standing (L. to R.): Dan Halpern, Bill Kennedy, Russell Banks, Richard Ford, Morgan Entrekin, James Salter, Terry McDonell, Charles Simic, Garrison Keiller.

“A carefree evening before the century turned. Boys just being boys. Good times.” – Dan Halpern

Frank with Press Proof at Ausable Inn PHOTO BY DEB FORBES

Always fun in the art area, with Victor Forbes 65

Following the Rule Of The Bone

BY STEVE SULLIVAN

At some point in the second half of the 1990s, high schooler Andy Farrell gave or lent classmate Dave Sullivan a copy of Russell Banks’ Rule of the Bone. Dave, my older brother, gave or lent me that copy. I took, and still take, my brother’s recommendations seriously. I recall fondly getting a rare invite to his room so he could play me a song on his stereo; it was Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening.” The rest of the time I had to root around his room when he wasn’t home.

Books were not the usual recommendation. Life revolved around music, movies, television and sports, and there was this new thing called AOL and Internet Explorer. I loved reading as a kid, mostly thanks to Calvin and Hobbes, but as I got older, while I still read for school, the thrills of being a teenager soon absorbed my free time.

Then the craziest thing happened. After I read Rule of the Bone, I shared it with my best friend, Ford. He passed it to Devo, who passed it onto Ez. I don’t know how Nick got it cause he could have gotten Andy and Dave it directly from his older brother Andy. It continued to spread from there.

The point is that people read this book. The kids who didn’t do the reading for class, read this book. My friend who dropped out of high school, read this book. Mr. Trano, our junior year English teacher, heard about this sudden outbreak of reading, and assigned Rule of the Bone to subsequent years.

I can’t speak for others, but I know why this book spoke to me. It speaks the truth from the first paragraph’s run-on sentences that bother my wife. It was boldly accessible and the story is about a young person. It is not some Hollywood superhero magical fantasy. It is a young person dealing with the adult world during a time and place.

Coincidentally, locations in the book overlapped with my own experiences. The Plattsburgh Mall was our go-to spot on parents’ visiting weekend, when my brother and I attended Camp Mr. Trano Dudley in Westport, NY. My family had also vacationed in Montego Bay. I could never forget leaving a nightclub with my brother when I was 18, and the offers we were made by the locals congregating out front. It was a Rasta cab driver who got us back to the safety of our resort.

And there was the yurt. Nick and Andy’s family had property in the Adirondacks, where so much of the book takes place. In the 1970s, their parents and their friends built a yurt on this picturesque plot of land that has a stream running through it. As we got older and driver’s licenses, we would take annual pilgrimages. We would work on various projects during the day, cook communal feasts, and play music around staggering bonfires at night. The yurt is the axis mundi of our group of friends. It wasn’t an abandoned school bus turned into a farm, it was better. To this day, we gather there, and now we get to bring our kids.

My Dad once told me that it was different to read The Catcher in the Rye when he was older. My Mom once told me that she still feels the same as when she was twelve years old. Re-reading Rule of the Bone as the father of a young child highlighted two things that did not land on my first few passes.

It’s a story about the importance of family told through the absence of reliable family. Bone’s quest, which begins with an acknowledgement of mistakes and a pledge of Ez, Nick, Devo, Ford and the author 66

The Upper Yurt

honesty, is to find a place where he belongs. The circumstances of his life at the point when the book begins do not allow him to feel that way in his own household.

The other thing that struck me is how sad Bone is. There is a bitterness to his vision. That it all could be different if this one thing would fall into place, yet it never does. He’s resigned. No young person should feel that way, or at least I’m going to do my damndest to make sure my kid does not.

As a kid, free time was this glorious construct. Playdates and sleepovers were the beginning. Then there were free periods in high school, where we could roam off campus on 7th Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Even better were Friday afternoons before parents got home from work. The free house was ultimate. I’d suspect my parents and their friends didn’t know how much their kids’ friends knew about their work schedules My wife, Barbara, our son, Henry, and I and travel plans. It was in these moments that our friendships were cemented in a variety of exploits, but more so in the ad nauseum and sensationalized retelling of the tales, most oftenly done with a soundtrack of roots reggae and gangsta rap.

As a parent, I can always be doing more. I could have not put on a cartoon and taken him outside instead, but we were going to go outside after his nap, and the cartoon is kind of educational. I could have put more oomph into the third reading of Pete the Cat that morning, but I was tired. Bone needed reliability, and that I can do, or will at least always set as my guiding star. The limitations of what I can control haunt me, much like the predictability of the tragedies we will face. But we’re going to face them all as a family.

When my son Henry was born, I assumed a new identity, much like Chappie becoming Bone. I was now Dad. My wife, Barbara, is Mom. My Dad is now Grandpa, and my Mom is Grandma, along with Barbara’s Mom, Patty. My Grandparents were great in that role, but I imagine having them as Mom and Dad would have been challenging. We all have Henry with Jah-stick a moment to be someone new in Henry’s eyes. Thank you, Mr. Banks, for the heads up.

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HE LEFT A HUGE LEGACY “Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself.

Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”

–Russell Banks, Continental Drift

Searching for Survivors, 1975 ​“ What you’ll remember is the sound of his voice, the rhythm of American speech patterns, as though he were seated beside you on a drive through the backwaters of New Hampshire.” –Kirkus Reviews

The New World, 1978 ​“ Magnetically centered, the kind of unequivocally brilliant performance that one can’t ever be sure of seeing twice in any writer’s career.” –Publishers Weekly ​“All of Banks’s stories are intriguing...If there’s better fiction about lingering American puritanism, we don’t know it.”

–Kirkus Reviews “There is abundant talent at work here...The pace and settings are varied enough to transform the title into a true measure of the collection’s achievement.” –Booklist

Trailerpark, 1981 ​

“Each story is uncommonly good...surprising, lively writing and believably human characters...Banks has a terrific eye, mordant yet affectionate, for the bric-a-brac and the​ pathos of the American dream.” –Washington Post Trailerpark is a lucid, witty frieze of a book.” –Saturday Review

​“ Mesmerizing...There are times when Banks’s prose fairly dazzles.” –Publishers Weekly

​Success Stories, 1986 “His prose has the precise force of a steady, measured outrage...He writes with a more merciless exactitude than Dreiser ever had, and with far greater and more self-conscious skill.” –The Nation ​ “The best of these stories are understated in their honesty, and they speak from a granite center born of innocence lost.” –Boston Globe

Cloudsplitter, 1998 “It is surely his best novel, a furious, sprawling drama that commands attention like thunder heard from just over the horizon.” –Time “Highly entertaining ... and deeply affecting…Like the best novels of Nadine Gordimer, it makes us appreciate the dynamic between the per­sonal and the political, the public and the private, and the costs and causes of radical belief.”

–New York Times “Russell Banks’s remarkable Cloudsplitter brings Brown back to life, not to teach history, but as the narrator of a morally questioning novel about fathers and sons and fanaticism and how madness is measured when the sane have fled.

–USA TODAY

A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013 ​“ In a dozen woodcut tales—firmly incised, deeply grained—Banks distills the lives of people of unfailing grit enduring reduced or radically altered circumstances...A resounding collection by an essential American writer.” –Booklist ​

“Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.” –Kirkus Reviews ​

“While these exquisitely crafted stories are highly personal, they are permeated by a sense of sadness about the death of the American dream.” –Publishers Weekly

“To make a great film, you need three things: the script, the script and the script.”

– Alfred Hitchcock 68

The Sweet Hereafter A small mountain community is devastated when a school bus accident leaves more than a dozen of its children dead. A big-city lawyer arrives to help the survivors’ and victims’ families prepare a class-action suit, but his efforts only seem to push the townspeople further apart.

At the same time, one teenage survivor of the accident has to reckon with the loss of innocence brought about by a different kind of damage. The Sweet Hereafter won three awards at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.

The Angel on the Roof, Selected Stories “Russell Banks is a fearless author.

He tackles themes and situations that other writers would not touch...His stories are devoid of pathos and display a level of intelligence and sensitivity rarely encountered in fiction.”

– Denver Post “At his shattering best, Mr. Banks offers answers that are tough, honest and inevitable without being simple...A book that is not to be missed.”

– New York Times

“Disturbing, haunting, but riveting all the same. You know Wade is on a course to destroy his life, but you can’t put it down, you have to follow to its inevitable conclusion.

Banks does a masterful job of weaving the narrative simultaneously from multiple voices and perspectives—Not an uplifting book—I found myself under a cloud of anxiety as Wade took his downward spiral, but if becoming involved and identifying with the character is a mark of a good story, then this one is great.” – Amazon critic

Trailer Park “This is one of my favorite collections of short stories! Russell Banks is a master and his world is colorful and vivid. Read it years ago and still think of it...” – San Diego Mom

Rule of the Bone Russell Banks’s quintessential novel of a disaffected homeless youth living on the edge of society “redefines the young modern antihero.” Think Holden Caulfield, Huck Finn.

Outer Banks “A marvelously written little book, fascinatingly intricate, yet deceptively simple.

Well worth reading more than once.”

– New York Times Book Review

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Affliction

Russell Banks

“That must be what it is to be a writer.”

Actes Sud Éditions Entretien avec Russell Banks, à Paris, en janvier 2017.

Son prochain roman, Voyager, est à paraître le 3 mai chez Actes Sud.

Comment êtes-vous devenu écrivain ?

Originally, I wanted to be an artist—a painter—and so until I was about 18 or 19 years old, I still thought of myself as someone who was becoming a painter and then I fell in love with literature, with reading.

I was a dropout from from college. I was alone and wandering the United States. At the time I was living in Miami and hitchhiking around the country and I started reading for the first time in my life in a serious way, taking books out of the public library and consuming them like candy every night for hours and hours. Then, like a clever monkey, I just started trying to imitate what I was falling in love with, which was literature; writing poems like Walt Whitman, or at least I thought they were, or short stories like Ernest Hemingway or long serpentine sentences like William Faulkner.

After a few years of this I realized that I was organizing my life, all my life—my economic life, my personal life, my social life, my work life—around this activity of writing and it was just a moment where I suddenly said, ‘I guess I must be a writer.’ I was like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I've been speaking prose all my life. Suddenly I thought, this is what I'm doing. That must be what it is to be a writer. There was never a moment where what we call an ‘aha’ moment where I said, ‘I think I'll become a writer.’ It turned out I was one.

Pour qui écrivez-vous ? Pourquoii écrivez-vous ?

Contre qui écrivez-vous ? Pour quoi écrivez-vous ?

It's very difficult to to say who one writes for beyond oneself. I know I write for myself. I write in order to understand what is otherwise mysterious to me, what I otherwise can't understand, a pressing, urgent sense of mystery that has to be penetrated and can only be penetrated through this mysterious process of writing. I think by bringing myself under the discipline of the art, I'm enabled to be more insightful, more truthful, more honest, more imaginative than I can be at any other time in my life. Most of the rest of my life, I'm not that intelligent and I'm not that honest, and I'm not that insightful. I just muddle along like most people. But when I'm writing, I have access to a kind of clarity that I have in no other way. So I think that answers the question, I hope it answers the question of ‘Who do you write for?’ And it is myself and to understand the world and myself in the world and other human beings in the world better than I could otherwise. And that answers the question in an important way, I think for me is why do I write? The question of who do I write against is more difficult for me to answer because I don't feel as though I write against any body or any community or any culture as such. I know I write against evil. I write against immorality. I write against greed. I write against certain abstractions that take human form. In that sense, I, I guess I'm writing against that which makes people smaller than they could be otherwise, or less visible than they could be otherwise, and less self-realized than they could be otherwise. But I don't identify those forces, those oppressive forces, with any particular people or any particular group of people. I'm fully aware that billionaires are likely to be less kindly and less generous than the poor. But I can't say that I write against billionaires. I write against the qualities of mine that perhaps made them into billionaires, but not against the individual human beings.

Votre prochain livre, Voyager, paraîtra en France en Mai 2017, Pouvez-vous nous en dire quelques mots ?

Voyager is a collection of non-fiction essays and the book is divided in half approximately between one long essay, the title essay, “Voyager” and then a series of shorter essays that follow and without intending it, the collection really is a book of travel. They're not about travel, not even in some cases about places, but about the traveler himself, which is me, myself moving through the world and the world includes the Caribbean, where I spent a great deal of my life coming and going, but also includes West Africa and the Seychelles and the the Andes Mountains, the Himalayan Mountains and Alaska, Scotland, and places that I have traveled and that have had an impact on me, some cases very dramatic impact. The title essay sets sea memoir to tone for the whole book, and allows it to be set up and constructed as a, as a narrative because the title essay explores my four marriages. And the first sentence in the book is a telling one, I think. The first sentence in the book is “A man who has been married four times, has a lot of explaining to do.” And then the book itself, over the course of its length, manages (I hope) to explain how and why this man, the narrator, managed to be married four times and divorced three times.

And so in that sense, it is memoiristic and it's personal in a way that I've never written before. It's exploratory. It takes me and I hope the reader to parts of the world that that mattered to me, and that enlarged me and changed me. And so it's a book of changes and, and, and how I changed over my lifetime starts with things that occurred and happened in my life when I was in my early twenties all the way up to just a year or two ago.

Parlez-nous de votre passion pour l’alpinisme et la randonnée en montagne !

I suppose like most writers I’m bookish and I sit in a chair most of the time either looking at a blank sheet of paper or a computer 70

screen and I love hanging out in libraries and bookstores and so forth. But also I'm a restless and a very physical person and so I think I would go mad if I couldn't be active in the world physically. The form that's taken and really in the last, I guess must be now 30 or more years has been mountain climbing and hiking, a strenuous trekking sort of thing. And it's taken me to some of the places that are described in the book Voyager. I mean most recently I was climbing in the Andes in Ecuador and I realized that I'm probably getting too old for this high altitude climbing. When I came down from the mountain, it was a moment of enlightenment, and I said to myself and to my fellow climbers, “Nobody my age keeps doing this.” And I asked the guides who were with us if there was anyone in his late seventies who was still out there doing Alpine climbing, and they said, “I'm sorry, but no, nobody's still out there doing this.” So I took my gear, my crampons, my ax, my helmet, my belts and ropes, and I gave them to a little group of high school students there in Quito, Ecuador so they could have this wonderful fancy gear that I was no longer going to use. I gave it up and I came Quito with my backpack much lighter than I went out, both figuratively and literally.

Voitre roman prefer?

I'm not sure I can answer that, probably I have to say, what novel would I eagerly re-read today that I have already read, maybe once, sometimes twice, three times and that would probably be Don Quixote. I used to read it once a year when I was in my twenties. I also used to read Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter once a year for many years, and then left off, and no longer have read it. I haven't read either book in 40 or more years and I would probably, if I had the few days free to do it and I would re-read anything I have already read, those would be the two books that I would go back to and re-read.

Voitre film préfere?

That’s very hard. Birth of a Nation is a scurrilous movie that glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. It's deeply profoundly racist. And I can't say it's my favorite in the sense that it's a good movie, a best movie, but it raises the most interesting to me and serious questions about race in America. The movie, I think is, was made in 1915, I believe. And it's cinematically brilliant. If you look at it visually, you say, my God, imagine doing that in 1915, but it is morally, profoundly corrupt and that raises a very important question, I think, about good art and bad art. Morality in art versus technique and skill and talent and so on. Same question raised by say, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which are anti-Semitic. Can they be good art, good poetry, and still be anti-Semitic?

So for me, when I say favorite film, I guess I'm saying film which forces me to think about film in a way I might not otherwise think, and that is one, especially in the light of racial history in the United States in the 20th and now 21st century, and perhaps even moreso in the last decade or so in the United States, where suddenly we find ourselves once again with the intensity we had in the 1960s confronting our racial history and perhaps confronting it with greater clarity and greater comprehension and acceptance than we have ever before. But the question first enters the public arena through art in film with Birth of a Nation.

Voitre plat préféré?

I'm an omnivore. I can't say I have a favorite food or food group. I take great – almost erotic – pleasure in in eating. I'm delighted when I can find well prepared food made from healthy and fresh components. I like to cook. I have gotten rather serious in the last few years about cooking to my wife's delight. And I realize what I really like – I do like cooking itself, the actual act of cooking – but I also really like shopping for groceries and working out a menu. I'm a somewhat of an obsessive compulsive and this gives me total control of the meal. If I go shopping and buy the food, if I make the menu first and then go ahead and find what I need and so forth, and then prepare it and then cook it. I love the whole, the whole sequence really.

Voitre mot préféré?

The American poet Robert Frost once said the most beautiful word in English is “cellar door.” Cellar door, the door to a basement.

You know, the sound of it, I think is what he was attracted to. Certainly not the meaning the denotation of it or the connotation of it, just the simple musical sound of it. Cellar door. Cellar door and I have to agree, (laughs), it seems to me to be a beautiful word, “cellar door.”

7777 The following is from the comments section under the youtube video pertaining to the preceding interview from Actes Sud editions with Russell Banks for the release of his book, Voyager: The commenter starts by stating: “I wanted to quote from these few phrases taken from Banks’s La Réserve: ‘’The thick, green cover of the Adirondack forests…The black surface of the lakes…The rocky islets emerging from the depths…The superimposed layers of dense mist tinged with rose’’.

They describe the fascinating but intriguing atmosphere of a story where the characters and locations are out of the ordinary. The isolation of the locations of life in this immense nature gives a feeling of impunity. Nature will eventually take over. It is not the cases that are buried but rather these less scrupulous characters. Guilt and perversioin challenge the established order. The reader will appreciate, along with the author’s writing style, the pleasure of flying and seeing views from above in relief. (Translated from the French by JP Audra).

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The Cloudsplitter awaiting it’s prey, as viewed from a country road in Keene Valley.

New York’s Mt. Everest at 5,344’, the original inhabitants named it Tahawus, it is now known as Marcy and protects the valley from the west, immortalized in the novel considered by many to be Russell’s masterpiece. We salute him daily as we traverse and refer to Frank Owen’s statement on page 62 often.

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PHOTO MONTAGE BY VICTOR FORBES

Editors Notes ……… DA N I E L H A L P ER N I N T ERV I EW B Y V I C T OR F OR B ES

Russell and Daniel Halpern, his long-time editor/publisher

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “The history of publishing is characterized by a close interplay of technical innovation and social change, each promoting the other.” This tenet is represented to the highest standard in the team of Russell Banks and his long-time editor/publisher Daniel Halpern whose memory of by chance sitting next to Ezra Pound on a Venetian vaporetto in 1964 is appropriated here as the lead to this interview. “Not knowing what to say, I asked him the first dumb thing that came to mind. Do you speak English? ‘Nope,’ he said, in perfect English” VF: You’re editing a writer stated to be “Word for word, idea for idea, one of the great American novelists.” How does one go about that?

DH: <Laugh>. Well, you had to be his friend first.

VF: And how did you accomplish that?

DH: Oh, I’ve known Russell since the ’70s. I don’t know exactly where we met. We saw each other when he came to New York and

I eventually hired him at Columbia to teach and then helped him get a job at Princeton, where he lived. We remained close friends for almost 45 years.

VF: That’s an amazing accomplishment. You were with him as he went from relative obscurity into semi-major super stardom until he became on a par—some would say—with Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Twain, Hawthorne, Langston Hughes—the great American writers he admired.

DH: Right. It was tough getting started for him. He was part of the Fiction Collective (Ed. note: “an author-run, not-for-profit publisher of artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction”) and his first number of books were more or less small press books.

He broke through when he got to HarperCollins—Harper and Row, I guess it was then—and started publishing his books with them. He really took off with Continental Drift. That book put him on the map.

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“Go my book, help me destroy the world as it is.”

— RUSSELL BANKS, Continental Drift any suggestions I make. That worked out pretty well over the last 50 years. So to answer your question—Russell’s a very careful writer. He did not need much editing, but I would go through the pages and most of my comments would be along the lines of, ‘This sentence doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t have the music of the other sentences around it.’ Or it might be, ‘This character’s not really developed enough. Couldn’t you kind of put a little more flesh on him, or do something to make that character a little more interesting?’ or ‘This seems inconsistent.’ … that kind of thing.

Basically cosmetic sorts of edits.

VF: Of course you would discuss character development and the importance of location.

DH: Yeah, we talked about those elements, especially with the later books because I spent so much time with him. I would be up there editing the book while he was there, so we would have a chance to talk at length about the work. I could ask him questions and he would explain and often we would talk out a lot of the stuff that was not necessarily on the page. It was through discussions at dinner or over drinks. Those were really happy days for me and for him—to be able to talk about his writing one-on-one, you know, without any, what would you say…?

VF: Distractions.

DH: Well, yeah. There was never any agenda. The only agenda was to make the book as good as we could make it and in talking through things, he explained what I didn’t understand or I didn’t quite get. I would say,‘Well, you know that because you wrote it and you have the whole book in your head, but I know nothing about it coming in so I’m confused by why this particular thing happened.’ He would then straighten it out—just by giving it a little bit of English, then we would move forward. It was a great way to edit a book. I haven’t spent as much time with any other author as I have with Russell, especially in these last pandemic years.

VF: Did you work on The Magic Kingdom with him?

DH: Yes. I also worked on Foregone. That was fun. We went back and forth on a lot of different issues with that book. The Magic Kingdom was also really fun to work on. It is such a beautiful book —so colorful—and he was just so good at invoking the natural world. I love all the characters that he created in that book.

VF: The reviews were unanimously lauding him as attaining further legendary stature with that particular book. It was unbelievable to read one after the next, after the next, after the next.

DH: Yes. I think people really understood what a fine writer Russell was and how varied. Also so socially conscious and aware of the political atmosphere. The last book that he wrote, which will be out next year, is three kind of inter-connected novels composed of characters who are not far right, not crazy right. But they’re Trump people, Trump supporters. Instead of going to the knee jerk clichés of left-leaning people toward right-leaning people, he makes them into real people. So you understand that they’re like us.

They just made a bad choice in his mind.There are a lot of people like that and Russell knew a lot of them. I mean not necessarily in Keene, wherever we are…they’re around.

VF: There’s a guy up here who is not bashful about his Foxian point of view yet he is a decent, upright, lawful honorary citizen.

VF: Were you involved in that one?

DH: No, no. I didn’t get involved until his editor at Harper— Robert Jones whom he loved and was a great editor—died very young. He had been publishing Russell and Russell asked if he could move over to me, but I was in a different imprint at Harper, which was okay in those days. Now it wouldn’t be. But he moved over to Ecco and then I started publishing him. I’m trying to think of the first book we did of his it may have been the one of the chimpanzees in Africa, The Darling, partially set in Africa. It may have been that book…

VF: That sounds like an Alex Shoumatoff book.

DH: Yeah, well, they were friends.

VF: The two of them participated in a book fair at The Mountaineer in Keene Valley with local authors. It was a great moment. Alex contributed a glowing tribute to Russell for this project and came down to perform in our Reggae show, even included the fact that Russell loaned him 10 grand to help him out of a jam.

DH: That was Russell. He helped many people, a very beloved author, and they all aren’t, as you know. Not all of them have that heart that he had.

VF: He accrued the legendary stature up here in Keene Valley.

DH: I’m sure he did (laughs) driving around in his vintage red truck with Rebus, his devoted canine..

VF: I was sitting in a bar one night before I knew who he was… before I knew anybody in Keene Valley and the conversation was about this writer up here who wrote a book, and who was in it, and who wasn’t in it, and that guy was the bus driver and so forth.

They were laughing, drinking and raising a little hell about it. It was funny, and then to actually get to meet these folk and get to know them was—and still is—a fascinating experience for a guy from The Bronx.

DH: Well, he loved it up there and he loved the people. He loved hanging out in the bars. He was a plumber’s son from New Hampshire. He came a long way from there.

VF: Plumbing is a vital profession. We have one up here named Nick Pepe, whose wife Aline has a statement in the introductory segment about how Russell was so well thought of in the neighborhood.

DH: Oh, well—there you have it.

VF: Exactly. When you would take on editing a manuscript from Russell Banks, what is the first thing that would start you rolling?

DH: I work with each author in a different way, depending on the way they write. Some authors give you a very rough manuscript, basically a first draft. Other authors give you what’s pretty close to a final draft that they’ve read out loud and re-written and re-written.

VF: So the editing is very different for each based on the quality of the manuscript that you get.

DH: Then you have to take into account the personality of the writer. In what way can they take criticism — if they can take criticism? My point always was, I’m going to mark up the manuscript in whatever way I think is right. Not for what I want, but for what I think is right for the book. And you can take it or leave it, you know? My job is to comment on things before the reviewers comment on them, but it’s your book and you can reject 74

Screen capture from ACTES SUD Interview

A stalwart supporter of the fire department. Gives blood. When Russell passed, I inquired of him, ‘Do you have any stories?’ And he said ‘We used to have a lot of great conversations at the bar.’ I can only imagine.

DH: Yeah, I can only imagine too. To Russell they weren’t value judgments. He was just aware of how other people felt and thought about the world, and he was resilient and able not only to understand—not necessarily accept, but understand—their positions, he was also capable of writing about them fairly, and in a real-time way. He would also always let you know what was on his mind. Kind and encouraging, that’s who he was.

VF: How did he produce so much in this day and age of the internet with so many distractions?

DH: He wrote at least one page every day. That’s what he said he wanted to do. And every day he would make sure that he wrote one page. Maybe some days he wrote more, but that was his job and he took it seriously. Every day that I was with him, he went down to his office and wrote that page. You know, if you write a page a day that’s 365 pages in a year, that’s a big novel.

on the long drive back to Santa Monica when Bowles tired of the party he’d been thrown at Cal State Northridge. The trip led to a conversation about life in Tangier and poetry, which Halpern was studying and to an important friendship with Bowles—and the founding with him of the international literary magazine “Antaeus”—and later, The Ecco Press.

After two years in Morocco and the launch of “Antaeus”, Halpern returned to New York City with a broken arm, five dollars in his pocket and no bank account. He somehow met ketchup heiress Drue Heinz, who offered to back the magazine if he would also start a book operation. The name she had in mind for the press, Ecco, was a reference to a beloved little dog she once owned. Today, HarperCollins’s imprint Ecco is a “tap natch” publishing house—home to both legendary authors and new talents. “Anybody can publish Hemingway,” Halpern said. “But to find a new young voice who is breaking new ground and writing in a way that nobody has written before, that’s the only reason really to be going into publishing.” Two years ago he left Ecco to edit books at Alfred A. Knopf.

Halpern’s recent poem in The New Yorker, “Cardinals,” is as brilliant, poignant and relevant as, dare I say, any five lines of verse ever composed.

CARDINALS Snow covering the garden shovel and roots of the river birch.

A fence and the forest flowing beyond, white, the air above sprinkled with blood.

About Daniel Halpern:

It was a chance chauffeur job, shuttling a bored author back to his hotel room, that ultimately got Daniel Halpern into publishing. The author was Paul Bowles, it was the late 1960s, and Halpern agreed to take the writer 75

The Magic Kingdom In Russell Banks’s new novel, The Magic Kingdom (publication date: November 8, 2022), an aged exile details the darker side of utopia.

“A more or less coherent narrative,” according to the foreword.

Readers will be held in thrall by the manner in which Banks delivers this historic saga, with enough real-life details to make it believable and enough imagination to keep it afloat as a powerful, well-spun yarn.

“The Magic Kingdom’s core is the emotional mirror of memory . . .A multi layered tale of innocence and guilt from a gifted storyteller.”

–KIRKUS REVIEW “A fascinating tale narrated over half a century.”

–NEW YORK POST “America has always been aspirational—the search for ‘a more perfect union,’ as outlined in the preamble to the Constitution, ongoing. But in The Magic Kingdom, Russell Banks’s beautifully crafted story of love and betrayal in an early-20th-century religious community, those ideals undermine one man’s chance for happiness, revealing the flaws in our American dream along the way…That sounds ponderous, but for master storyteller Banks, it’s simply another outing for one of his quirky, damaged Florida protagonists.”

–Clea Simon, BOSTON GLOBE “In Disney World, ‘between the Rainforest Cafe and the Animal Kingdom,’ an archivist attests in Russell Banks’s novel The Magic Kingdom, there is an old, untended Shaker cemetery commemorating the members of the commune that owned the land in the early years of the 20th century. The Shakers famously practiced celibacy, so their movement was not designed to endure, yet the purity of this impermanence has secured them a lasting place in historical memory. Their brief settlement on what would become Disney property has given Mr. Banks an irresistible juxtaposition for a novel that movingly dramatizes the conflicts between religious utopianism and worldly desires.”

–Sam Sacks, WALL STREET JOURNAL “Eerily timely. Can what’s gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.”

–Margaret Atwood, author of THE TESTAMENTS “Banks is one of my favorite authors and his books have a special place on my shelves, not only because the tales are compelling, but also because they bear re-reading. America is Banks’s primary canvas and many of his characters come from the working class or the shabby margins of society, and are often misfits and outcasts. I was eager to read The Magic Kingdom and wasn’t disappointed—it never takes Banks long to hook me and pull me into his fictional world.”

–Brian Tanguay, CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS “Masterfully crafted . . . The Magic Kingdom is not the experience as it happened but as it’s been distilled for decades in the crucible of a guilty conscience. [Banks is] interested in the way grand schemes intended to perfect human nature produce instead a combination of secrecy and shame that can spark wildly unpredictable results. Always in the background of Harley’s reminiscence hovers Disney’s effort to create the Happiest Place on Earth—just the latest project of dreamers and schemers who sought to make Florida in their image…

Banks has created another fascinating volume in his exploration of the American experience. Our literature is thick with skepticism, condescension and downright derision directed at anyone who takes their faith more seriously than an Instagram poem. But Banks has something more complex in mind than the hypocrisy of a religious leader or the predictable impurities of a pious community.”

–Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST “As always happens when I read Russell Banks’s work, I couldn’t put it down. That is the Banks magic—the propulsive force of the narrative, even as his stories twist and turn through various diversions, asides, and introspections—for the narrative voice is always constant, and that constancy never fails to hold the reader in its grip. Banks is still working at full blast, creating work as good as anything he has ever done and—is it possible?—perhaps even better.”

–Paul Auster, author of 4 3 2 1 “Banks dazzles in this story of a Floridian Shaker community torn apart from within and without . . . The author uses himself as a narrator, a metafictional device that throws the fictional past into stark relief.”

–LOS ANGELES TIMES “Banks’s penetrating dissection of the American dream and its frequently unfulfilled promises is consistently profound.”

–PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “Banks’ prose is … melodic, the work of a seasoned raconteur. The characters are nuanced and three-dimensional, simultaneously full of pride and doubt. An elegiac and introspective portrait of a young man and how his fear of loneliness manifests that of which he is most afraid.”

–BOOKLIST 76

Russell holding the just-finished manuscript of The Magic Kingdom 77

Endnote Nov. 14, 1970—I somehow managed to convince my best friend (and lead singer/lead guitarist of our band) to venture from Belmont Avenue up in the Bronx to the bowels of Manhattan’s East Village, the home of the Filmore East for a strange double billing: Sha Na Na and The Mothers of Invention. He was Old School even then, a tough guy from the “neighborhood” who didn’t much care for the music of the day, other than the Beatles and their individual work. As far as he was concerned, musical history could have ended in 1968, Elvis’ comeback year.

Yet, he was my bud and I was his guitar player so he accompanied me that evening to the Filmore. It was a raunchy setting outside.

Street hustlers who would stab you over a nickel bag, garbage everywhere. Hippies begging for spare change, panhandling they called it then.

AMidst this scene is Freddie Belmont in his coiffed hair, straight off a styling and hit of European Natural Black at Nardi’s on Fordham Road, sporting Beatle boots and manicured nails, polished clear, clean and bright. We took our seats in the mezzanine, a few feet from the sound man. Sha Na Na was playing and this piqued his interest. We had managed to organize our own “Grease Day” at school—Bronx Community College—and it gave a bunch of us the chance to comb our long hair back, put a dollop of Brylcreem in and act tough. The Dean of Administration heard of our plan and decided that we’d be in big trouble if we went through with it. Remember, this is 1970 and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John had not yet emerged on the scene. Grease was real, not some Fonzie comedic Happy Days bullshit affair. But our pleas eventually prevailed and we had our Grease Day, but not on campus. The big event was a football match between us greased-up hippies and the short-haired juicers. I was the quarterback and on the last play with the game on the line, I chucked Fast Eddie Kouzoujian a perfect spiral that cut through the dank drizzle of the Jerome Avenue park and led him perfectly. This was no “Hail Mary” pass. It was a diagrammed play. Eddie dove parallel to the ground, to exactly where the ball was thrown and slid about ten yards in the mud, holding on to the ball for the winning touchdown.

Sha Na Na did their usual set. Bowzer concluded the show with his now famous line,“There’s one thing I want to tell you effin’ hippies: Rock and Roll is here to stay.” After he spat at the audience (for real) they broke into the great Danny and the Juniors song of the same name, ending their segment.

While the crew was setting up for the headliner, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, a video played on the big screen. It was a clip of Dion singing “Runaround Sue” from an American Bandstand circa 1960. Serendipitous, to say the least. Zappa came on and was leading his brilliant ensemble in a tour de force, featuring Flo and Eddie and a song about a mudshark. Highly entertaining. Smack dab in the middle of the set, a lithesome figure with long black hair, looking kind of like Elvira, slithered onto the stage. It was Grace Slick and Zappa stopped his show to let her speak. “Boys and girls,” she said, “I have some news. On Monday night we’re going to have a special concert. The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna, The Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane. Tickets will be on sale tomorrow morning at 9:00.

Thank you.” She walked off just like that and Zappa and the Mothers finished their set. The next morning I arose early and made the trip back down to the lower East Side. By 10:00 a.m. I had four third row tickets in my hand—total cost: $22. When we took our place Monday night while the crew set up the stage, they were the best seats in the house. I was on a snap line looking right at Garcia who was stationed behind the pedal steel guitar. Seated, he was looking directly at me as he played, he really had no choice. Young, vibrant, he had the world at his disposal, yet he seemed genuinely meek and humble, happy to be there, yet empowered. He was generating sounds from the instrument that were seriously not meant to be. On “Dirty Business” he was otherworldly. That night I felt I gleaned something from Garcia, as I spent the entire New Riders show gazing into his countenance.

Later I learned what.

“Each note,” he said, “is a spirit.” When Garcia was at the top of his game, which was more often than not, those spirits cascaded from his soul to his fingers to his guitar—“light giving light to light, fire setting fire to fire,” as Stephen Spender described Shelley’s poetry in Brief Lives. Even the silences carried weight. The music took us all—players and listeners—to another realm, a realm of purity, bliss. “To forget yourself,” Garcia said, “is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe.”

Substitute note with “word”, music with “writing” and Shelley with “Banks” and there you have it.

My fascination with the Cloudsplitter began as a camper in Keene Valley in 1961, when I knew it as Mount Marcy, the tallest peak in New York State at 5,344 ft. above sea level. The mountain is in the heart of the Adirondack High Peaks region of the High Peaks Wilderness Area. I wrote a composition about the climb for my eighth grade English class. My father gave me the title “Rendezvous At Two” because when we finally made it down from the mountain, crossed Johns Brook and skulled down a very muddy, rain-soaked trail back to the Garden, with one of my sneakers lost in the rapids, the clock in the mess hall read 2:00 a.m. Climbing and successfully descending Tahawus, the ancient’s term for the mountain, was a great victory for me. Being able to bring it up to date, I can say that my fascination hasn’t withered. I gaze upon it’s ancient summit every day I drive down my mountain road, named after the land management genius Adrian Edmunds whose son-in-law Frank Owen walked those undeveloped acres with him as my future, unbeknown to them at the time, was secured. How appropriate it is for me, then, that Cloudsplitter becomes Russell Banks’s calling card, his signature piece, his masterwork. Though the jury is still out on John Brown—terrorist or savior—I am certain that when Russell approaches the bench on Judgment Day he will be greeted with these words: “Well done my good and faithful servant…Let’s celebrate together.”

Would that we all could one day be at that table, to join in that celebration—Russell’s movable feast.

– VICTOR FORBES 78

Keene Valley Elegy A big storm like this used to thrill me, a visit from a god, thirty-six inches and still snowing!

But now I know about the great floating continents of plastic twice the size of Texas, in the Atlantic and Pacific both, and their spawn the micro-beads, so although the laden woods look much as they did when I was born, snow is a mock consecration to me now.

Still, it’s a thrill to see the human world struck dumb and whited out, an ocean of motionless waves, no cars, no lights, no music, only the illusion of earth as it was before I understood it was I who had made it a god.

In summer Russell and I hunt for chanterelles, which the snails will devour if they find them first, and scavenge a few high ledges for inky wild blueberries, scant handfuls. First love, last love.

I’m glad my last love is not for a god.

I refuse to wake up again in a graveyard with neither flowers nor words for the dead.

– CHASE TWICHELL

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“And though he has been taken from our daily lives, his work and his spirit and inspiration remain.”

PHOTO BY CHASE TWICHELL – WORDS BY RUSSELL BANKS, FROM HIS PAUL MATTHEWS EULOGY 80