Alice Elliott Dark's Think of England, like her short story
collection In the Gloaming, features a striking Maxfield Parrish painting
on the cover, the result of the author's lobbying. "I've always loved Parrish,"
Dark explains over the phone, "and when it came time to talk about covers, I
said why not use something by one of the all-time great illustrators instead of
making something up on the spot?" She admires the strong narrative sense in
his pictures, as well as what she perceives as a dreamlike, out-of-time quality.
These two traits can also be seen in her highly polished fiction. Think of
England, Dark's first novel, begins the night the Beatles appeared on the Ed
Sullivan show, an event which provides a temporary focal point for young
Jane and her squabbling family. In subsequent sections, set in punk-era
England and contemporary New York, the adult Jane tries to make peace with
the tragedy that occurred that night and comes to realize that just because
somebody isn't around doesn't mean that they aren't a part of your life.
RH: Had you been intending to work on a novel for a while?
AED: I actually started working on a novel five or six years ago which turned out
to be Think of England, even though the early versions are nothing like what's left.
The first thing I had was the structure, although it's not exactly the same structure the book
has now. I wanted to write about one day in the life of a woman at three different periods in
her life. The first section I worked on was the middle section, set in England, which is now
set over a period of about eight months. I wrote a few versions set during one day and
never got it right, because I wanted it to be a straightforward narrative without a lot of
backstory, but it was impossible. So I let it go. The idea of looking at a person at three
different stages of her life stayed with me, though, throughout the writing process.
RH: You start the novel in Wynnemoor, the location of many of your
short stories, so there's a sense of continuity with your earlier work. Why
did you invent that town?
AED: I realized that I was trying to invent new settings over and over again, so
one story would be in Connecticut, one story would be in Westchester, and the settings
would all be similar to one another, so I decided to create a town like the one in which I
grew up, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. But it also draws upon elements of those
towns in Connecticut and Westchester, so it's really more of a hybrid town. When I began
the novel, I thought to myself, "I've made up this town, I'm attached to it." I think I'll keep
going back to it. The novel I'm writing now is not set there, but the next one will be.
RH: There are incidents in the book that may be ghostly encounters.
Do you believe in such things?
AED: I don't know if there are ghosts. I've had experiences, but that doesn't
prove they exist. I lived in an apartment in New York where there was a ghost, and I used
that for the last scene in the book where Jane feels a presence in her apartment. But I didn't
make it clear if that came from outside her or inside her. I do think that people have those
experiences, but what it is, I'm not sure. I also believe in more subtle experiences where
people have the chance to communicate with dead people in all kinds of ways. It's
happened to me and to many people. There's not as much as a barrier as we think between
the living and the dead. Whether it manifests as a ghost, or a strong sense of that person's
spirit, even in your own mind, it's a very powerful experience. I chose a ghost for the
story because it's the most extreme form of that experience.
RH: An earlier draft of this novel was at least twice as long as the final
version, and included a very different fate for Jane's father. How did you
go about cutting that much material?
AED: I didn't really cut it. I just let that entire version go and rewrote the book.
I'm not a cut-and-paste person, I'm a complete rewriter. When that version didn't work, I
just dumped it. It's a sad and hard thing to do, because there are parts of that version I
really loved. The first section was much longer, and covered the parent's separation and
finally their divorce. I miss a lot of that material, too, but it didn't really speak to the theme
I was getting at as I wrote more deeply into the book. That's what happens to me--I'll try
something, and if it doesn't work, I'll throw it out and start over completely instead of
trying to fix it.
My husband just said to me, after having read the final version for the first time last week,
that he missed a few parts from that earlier version. I know what he meant, but one of the
important things for me in becoming an author is that you start to think of a story as a
whole, rather than a collection of parts you like very much, so you have to be willing to let
parts go for the sake of the whole. My process has a lot to do with writing until I've
figured out what I want to say, then writing a fresh version based on that new
understanding. I may still extract a story or two from the parts I let go, but I'm not sure
about that yet.
RH: It sounds like you and your husband are very judicious about the
degree to which he offers his insights as an editor by looking at your
writing.
AED: We've been together for sixteen years, and there were periods earlier in our
relationship when I showed him every single thing. I don't do that anymore, because I've
become a lot better at judging my own work and don't need his voice as much as I used to.
But if I don't know about something, I'll show him. I also know that he's always going to
tell me the truth, so I have to wait until I'm ready to hear it from him. Sometimes I'm not
ready.
He saw a lot of parts of this book as I was writing it; last week was just the first time he'd
read the story as a whole. It was fun to have him read it at this point, when I have this
much distance from the story, and there's nothing any of us could do about it because the
book's out there already.
RH: Were you prepared for the amount of attention "In the Gloaming"
brought to you and your writing?
AED: No, and I'm still not. I wrote the story very quickly, it was published very
quickly, and everything happened so fast that I didn't have time to sit with it the way I did
with some other stories. I don't feel completely identified with the story because of that,
but I am identified with it. It's wonderful that people would care so much about
something I've written, and I never could have imagined the response I got to that story,
but it's one part of a huge body of work I'll produce over my lifetime. It's not the only
thing that's happened for me, and my sense of identity around it is limited.
For a while, people just wanted me to write that story again, and I couldn't. I'd written it,
and now I was writing other things. It put me in a box for a while, but that passes.
RH: Being the author of what's considered one of the best short stories
of the twentieth century is a great box for a writer, but it's still a box.
AED: I think I've gotten past that now. I remember reading an essay about Doris
Lessing praying that one day somebody would review a book of hers without mentioning
The Golden Notebook and comparing everything else she wrote to it. I'm certainly
not comparing myself to her, but there was a tiny version of that for me, too. It was hard
for me to know what to do about that. Should I try to write something else with that same
feeling or tone, or should I just move on? It took me a while to figure it out.
I feel grateful for some of the things that happened after that story was published, but also a
sense of detachment. What happened was often so external to me. It was like winning the
lottery, but even more so, because I didn't set out to have any of this happen. I just wrote a
story.
RH: You said that you've wanted to write a novel for a number of
years, but was there any commercial pressure on you to do a novel as well?
AED: Totally. Right after I published the story "In the Gloaming," people started
telling me I should write a novel, and I thought, "Wait a minute! I just wrote a really good
story. Can't I just write another one? Now that I've finally figured out what I'm doing, do
I really have to start all over again?" The business reality, though, is that the chances of
making money on a novel are much better than the chances of making money on a short
story collection, so publishers are looking for novels. I resented that for a while, then I
adjusted to the reality of it, and I accepted that it was an opportunity for me to learn
something new and that I was lucky that I could write a novel and have it published based
on the fact I'd written stories. So I was pushed, but it turned out to be a good thing.
RH: And you mentioned a novel you're working on now, and one
planned for after that, so it sounds like you're comfortable with the
direction your writing has taken.
AED: I am. I'll still write stories, but I like this space. A novel is a much
looser entity than a short story, and has a lot more to do with character
change, seeing how time effects the development of a person. Even if it's
confined to a twenty-four hour period, I think there's more movement
internally than there is in a short story. I wrote poetry for a long time, and
then I needed more room, so I wrote stories. I don't think I needed more room
to start writing novels, but now that I have it, I like it, and I'm going to stick
with it.
