The four novellas in Allan Gurganus's The Practical Heart vary wildly
from each other in their settings and subjects--even in their language--but
whether he's writing about a woman who scrimps and saves her entire adult
life to have John Singer Sargent do a portrait of her or a young boy growing
up in the 1950s who stumbles upon the explosive secrets behind his parents'
marriage, Gurganus is always, ultimately, focused on one particular issue.
"Each of the four main characters has a different way of looking for grace or
salvation, whether it's through aesthetic terms, sexual terms, or racial terms,"
he says, calling from his home in North Carolina, "but they're all after the
same thing, trying to answer the question of how to live your life ethically
while getting what you want out of existence." It's a question that he addresses
not just through the content of his writing, but, as our conversation revealed,
in its creation as well.
RH: Whose idea was it to put each of the four stories in a
different typeface?
AG: It was my idea, but I've worked with Peter Anderson on the interiors
of all my books. He's immensely imaginative, and one of those unusual people
willing to buck the orthodoxies of his profession if the artist asks for it. Just as
the voices of the four pieces are very different from each other, it seemed
important to me that they appear different from each other as well and
indicate the range of the work.
RH: Each of the stories has some connection to Falls, North
Carolina.
AG: It seems to me that the more fiction I set in this mythological town--
and I've used it since Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--the
richer its ground becomes. Having made up this town, which participates in
certain geographic facts of the town where my life started but is also at odds
with certain other facts, I can now walk its streets in a very real way. I can see
houses and wonder who lives there, walk through the garden gate and see
tricycles on the front porch. I know where the courthouse is, I know who was
hanged there, I know who escaped with his life.
You don't need to move to New York or San Francisco to have a big life. The
four lives I write about in this book are immense lives, full of passion and
absolute commitment, but at the same time they're lives that frequently could
be missed or overlooked by most people. I think it's harder in a way to write
about middle-class people because they're good at keeping their secrets. But if
you can crack the code of that hidden world, really plunge into the pivotal
issues at the center of these lives, they really are Sarah Bernhardt and John
Barrymore writ large.
RH: Several critics have noted that one of the stories, "He's One,
Too," originally appeared in a much different context, in a
collection of autobiographical essays. But, in addition to the fact
that it takes place in Falls, which should tip readers off, the
narrator, despite his obvious similarities to you, never refers to
himself as Allan Gurganus.
AG: I was approached through my late friend, James Merrill, to
contribute to an anthology of gay coming out stories, a book called Boys Like
Us. It seemed to me that one of the things the world really didn't need was
another transcript of a sensitive young man who told his parents he was gay,
at which they wept and cried and tore their garments then somehow came
around at the end. It's a story that's been told many times, well and badly, but
is now extremely familiar.
My grouchy response to the assignment was the line: "In North Carolina, in
1957, we had just one way of coming out. It was called getting caught." But the
editor said, "Go ahead. Write whatever you want to write."So I wrote a piece of
fiction, and like all decent fiction it participates in some things I know and
some things I wanted to know. But it's not a memoir, and it seemed to me
somewhat ungrateful on the part of critics and readers to treat it as if it were a
memoir, trying to check up on the dates and see how much I got right or
wrong about my own life. Who cares? As long as the fiction works, and I hope
that it does...
I wish I could say the reality had changed since the mid-'50s, when I set the
story, but I based it on a superintendent of schools who was caught in a public
bathroom maybe four years ago and driven out of town on the basis of being
accused. So this is a reality that's unfortunately all too present.
RH: There's a scene in "He's One, Too," where a magazine editor
approaches the narrator for a short story, and he proposes a story
about a gay character, and is accused of trying to cram an agenda
down the editor's throat. I know that's something you've faced in
one form or another over the years.
AG: We all resist categorization; I'd like to be able to be a pansexual
writer, to write about anybody and everybody without being thrown into gay
lit or straight lit, but there are certain expectations that are hard to avoid. And
if a straight magazine approaches you, you're expected to limit yourself in
terms of subject matter according to the audience of the magazine. What's odd
is that by insisting you have a right to write about gay characters, you appear
to have opted out of the option of writing about all others. And since gay
people only make up three to ten percent of the population, that's a pretty bad
deal. I want very much to look every experience in the eye, tell a story from
any perspective of race or gender or age. I'm a holdout for that. I'm stubborn,
and I insist on telling all the stories at once.
There's a wonderful review in the Atlantic, full of praise for the book,
but it says that all of the stories are about gay life. Well, two of the novellas, as
far as I can tell, have no gay characters whatsoever. It's almost as if even in
the act of praising, you're categorized and somewhat limited by that
perception. But as the world goes, that's not... Well, I'd rather be doing this
than digging ditches, that's for sure, and I know that my complaints are
somewhat beside the point in terms of the larger issues most people live with.
RH: Living in North Carolina, you're surrounded by the sort of
houses that are featured in "Preservation News." Have you fallen
under their spell, as the main character in that story did?
AG: Yes, but I'm almost monogamous. I've found one that I love more
than all the others, and I've been trying hard to prop it up and save it. I think
it's a great discipline for anybody, but especially a writer, to move into a house
that's been occupied by over a hundred years worth of previous residences
and become its curator, become the registrar of all the ghosts who've passed
through.
This particular story had its genesis when a friend told me that the
preservation movement in Washington, D.C., had been decimated by HIV. The
three leading contenders to head the movement, the men with all the
information about these grand old houses in their heads, had all gone down
very rapidly in the early '80s to AIDS. I thought it was a strange paradox that
these people who had set themselves up as preservationists should die so
young. It seemed to me a wonderful opposition, a wonderful tension, and
therefore a wonderful story--so I tried to create one of these young men and
reveal what the houses he'd saved would offer him as he expired early.
RH: There's a brief supernatural element to "Preservation
News," but the story is, overall, not a fantasy or a supernatural
story.
AG: I am a believer in ghosts. I've seen several, so for me to write a
ghost story is like writing a person story. They're there for the seeing if you
know how to look for them.
RH: That ties back to your comments about living a rich life
outside the big city. To me, it seems to be about the willingness to
pay attention to your life, and what is present around you.
AG: And to make up your life, and to entertain yourself--not just with
video rentals, but with the company of friends, the talent and the charm of the
people around you. For Halloween last year, I throw open the front three
rooms of the house for trick-or-treaters, and we had the seven deadly sins as
played by seven of my most sinful and colorful friends. In a way, I feel like
I'm living in the best part of the nineteenth century, where people did invent
of an evening--and though you know everybody on stage, there's a kind of
magic that's possible when you're playing roles. In the urban centers, there's
so much entertainment for a price, tickets for everything, that you're cheated
of the right to sit around to bullshit and concoct and remember aloud. For a
writer, it's isometrically strengthening where the mythology has to come
from the inside out, not the outside in.
RH: Writing strikes me in some ways as a very contemplative
life, but in speaking with you, it also becomes plain that a writer
cannot split "writing" away from "living."
AG: That's a great point, and I think that the fact that I spend six to eight
hours a day alone in my study paradoxically brings me closer to other people
when I finally emerge. Part of the luxury of being a writer is that you have
those hours alone; what they teach you is how mandatory community is, how
much we live through our friends and our family. Yeats talks about perfection
of the art or perfection of the life and how you have to choose, but it seems to
me that if you're working correctly, in the right spot, the admonition is to live
your life deeply and completely and do your work in the same way. The
swinging back and forth between art and life is all a question of scheduling.
RH: What have you read lately that you've enjoyed?
AG: I'm reading a lot of my own student's work right now, and I'm in a
wonderfully avuncular position of seeing them produce mature and beautiful
books. Anne Patchett's Bel Canto, for example, is a very achieved and
lyrical book, and Elizabeth McCracken has just published Niagara Falls All
Over Again, a fictional meditation on partnership and connection between
two great comic actors. It's a great chronicle of a marriage, even though it's
not a sexual relationship; it's about how you live in relationship to a major
person in your life.
I'm always rereading Chekhov's stories. They're like my multivitamins, I take
one a day. They're an endless store of compassion and invention; the way
humor and tragedy exist side by side in a single sentence of his has always
been influental and benficial to me. I'm working on a new novel, a companion
piece to Widow, called The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist
Church. I love writing about matters of the spirit, and I certainly love
writing about matters of the libido, so getting them into one baggy monster of
a novel is fun. And I want it to be really comic, to have the clip and energy of
comic writing, which I think we need now more than ever.
I used to hope that I could write alternating comic and tragic chapters, and
then I decided I could alternate bewttwen paragraphs, and then sentences;
now I'm trying to turn the train around in mid-sentence and go from comic to
tragic and back a word at a time. We need prose that can handle those kind of
hairpin turns to honor the complexity of our emotional lives now.
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