A Word on Words; 0916; Paule Marshall

the world and were programmed delving into the world of books and their other this week paul marshall talks about pauper your host for a word and words mr johnson publisher of the tennessee air matt singing it is my great pleasure to have as my guest on were the words of one of the really fun writers in this country paul marshall welcome to world word strength is the president the hands nice to talk about books with one who love them and love to ride him but his latest book dollars is a an exciting all the novel is so crammed world social implications it is a book that helps us i think appreciates the coaches that stretch across national boundaries but more than that it's just one terrific yarn that if you do you create

a situation that really in some ways i suppose for flex your own insights and your own knowledge on understanding on appreciation and in some ways do your own discomfort with the policy but twain this country and western zephyr i think it is so your discomfort yes i think it is a measure of discomfort but i think perhaps even more than discomfort our daughters and most of my novels reflects a longing for i kind of reconciliation and avi connection of those two poles a connection between the world of african

america and the world of the west indies and i think it comes out of my own background because i'm someone who's both african american born and raised on the mean streets of bedford stuyvesant in new york and my friends growing up their parents had mainly come from the south odden an up with surrounded by world of a solidly african american in fact my spiritual mother was a woman by the name of miss jackson and she was so the neighborhood here present you come from the deep south so there was that part of me and then at the same time there was a part of me that was west indian because my parents both my mother and father had come in the early twenties from this tiny island in the west indies call barbados and they maintain that like so many immigrant groups they maintained a solid sense of home here in the states so i would be out the street totally african american i come home and he told the west india by

either the pages these two people as i've always wanted to bring together the two hands of myself or brown girl first well that's right round stones of this is not the right into this thing is not new know but this is an historic oh absolutely you begin in a very sterile antiseptic take us through his young woman into place so many young women is these days an abortion clinic or attacked we only know the reality well the pregnancy and her decision to terminate and done she's not comfortable actually sought out a place i should ask very distressed so i think she's trying to kind of maintain a veneer of being in

control of it all and being in a sense above it all but what i try to convey in that first chapter is the ease the deceased that she feels they are in that abortion clinic and the terrible conflict the terrible conflict and i opened in deliberately with that seeing in the abortion clinic because first of all technically i wanted to use of seeing that would capture the main character versus animal would a crisis and how life means here was that as a novelist you want a beginner with something that engages the reader but also at the same time i would suggest another level that one of the things that person would be the abortion scene is really symbolic of something that person needs to cut away from her salary and that's a kind of dependency and are looking to her father emotionally that she's really desperately trying to move away from throughout the entire novelists i wanted to signal that at the

very beginning of the novel by that scene at the clinic you know this is a goal i never come on this program a lot of what i learned something you just used the word i've never heard used for us posed a hyphenated word and does the us do and it occurred to me that if you take a hyphen out that that really tells you where the words he's sorry and i use the word is easily in the future whenever it's all we know well then you have this ability to take us with flashbacks into another relationship the mother was at a connecticut school teacher her father pm

primus mckenzie is it as a politician from from the island so let's talk about that merger because it's a fast lane somewhere and that somewhere in the book that i guess her mother is talking about the how any of infighting it is tight union fighting in how infighting in and they would say that she was served the wife he came to yes the the expression is the wife the pm when and find i find an american wife and i'm in america and there are those your own thoughts was yes yes seven

percent rate is the bill's conference where i love my father taught me there's a lot about the honeymoon is about those letters where lake where they come from it is a form of narrative that speaks her character in a unique way to get you to let you know her but it also tells the story carries the theme of the story and conveys information you must have if you get from here to there not talk about those letters and the technique of using force well i very much wanted to experiment with different forms in this novel what were some of the ways that i could reveal my characters aside from the standard ones and it cited that with a stale i would try to capture her voice and the sense of her as a character through letters mainly also not only a few letters but what others thought of her

and how they let us permit us to no es del sol that she's revealed not and the standard way that the novelist employees that i employ say with mercer and her friends in the other characters but rather as dale comes to us mainly through those letters and i was able to capture odd to create for her kind of unique voice i have this this old woman who understands throws up all that is familiar to go to this place where she really nice and spends most of her life trying to adjust to it but her love for the piano is so great and so deep that that in a sense that makes her to overcome all it is a love story though is another bs yeah and an end it trails and a betrayal world are often what the ultimate yes the ultimate betrayal to save and are too

astral and then a tiny tiny yes as well fortified ford and unburdened by any daniel's where they come from right right where they come from they come from as most of my characters from any number of people and from the imagination what i do and creating a character like what updike a set to do he makes a list of everything you could possibly create and think about that person an event of course he doesn't use all those things on the list iraq has such a complete sense of who that character is and in creating asking for id and finally daniels i thought of a number of people that now i call upon a take a little bit here a little bit of a hair and then brought to bare my imagination and creative than you could not go to anyone and say oh yes i'm sure that passed before it was based on you know but it's out of many different people little bits and pieces and that's

why the creation of the novel takes such a long time because i'm always i'm surrounded by this huge jigsaw puzzle puzzle i create each piece each piece has to be fashioned and then i take the longest time to put the pieces together and i find fascinating well you know part of what this program is about has to do with with what motivates riders what discourages them how in fiction characters are created and how to grow i have had office in a chair and tell me i like best about this that some characters get away from that they create and planned to give the mine a role and suddenly they explode and are off on the adventure of their own with the author of not infinite sometimes the instinct to go with that scene has to be drawn back and sometimes takes over takes

over but i take it however that in vain in your in your structuring of the characters that you use a creative piece of a puzzle and then see fit in and what happens if the board what's the puzzle piece won't fix what of astral had not been unable to contain her work in that little niche it's a large niche in the story the task before the voice is so powerful now you realize my agent to my agent asked her favorite character mobile yesterday are absolutely and she did take over one draft was really in a sense asked for ford's voice all over the place and i simply have to go back in order to balance the book and to maintain line item my main character was to confine and control asked before that took some doing because i was seduced by her voice i mean i could hear it took over my head

over my inner ear and so that's the struggle as a struggle when once you kind of now what you want to do with the novel then you really have to see to it that the pieces the parts one part is not just kind of take over the whole ballgame like whiskey lime rickey i really i really found that you over periods in the book and i'm not surprised that you found or so so last on the promise because character development is so important to the novelist out i say where does he come from and you have created this charismatic ultimate politician he studied politics to do it are just and i take it to it that he's been positive and the number of people in the eye became politics because it

seemed finally something that i could get involved in and the person away when i started going down to the west indies or west indians take their politics seriously i mean it was a political campaign than the entire island is taken a well used thousand nine election yes that's right and so going back down to the island's back and forth constantly when i was an adult but since i became an adult i met any number of politicians and time as mackenzie comes out is a composite of all of those charismatic dream highly verbal bible thumping baptist preacher kind of politicians that you get in the west they are the most fascinating candidates as i wanted to kind of capture a particular kind of west indian politician in primus mackenzie and also the kind of secure way to hand i kind of the center of all of these women there's a

section of the book called pollstar and he is a kind of pollstar and the allies have a kind of orbit around him and that's one of the things the ursa has to wrestle with you know how am i going to come out for a month and prodding the ts eliot out from under the shadow of that red rock from in the shadow of my father and therefore in a sense also deliver the other women her mother asked afford even celestin the nurse now yours as though they're so has this pivotal role that's why the end of the novel a mother estella calls her home and says essentially to what you have to do it i can't i really can't you know you mention the bible thumping baptists resource but also their creeps in other religious elements and other political ferment sour yeah

well i think that they're not as striking as the piano the pm his mastery of the political platform but in a sense they have a year and i tried to suggest them in for example versus almost him reverend regatta fall on the historical figures those two lovers get from slavery congo jane and bill can tell she feels is said she has been commissioned to write this story and this is what's so devastating when her professor at college he refuses to allow her to continue with that with that particular topic for his senior paper and served throughout the novel is this need on her part this part of her understanding herself understanding of history understanding the relationship of black men and women that's why it's a necessary for her to write that paper and it becomes a kind of holy

grail of holy quest for her why do you think what do you think her love of storytelling right fran the kitchen of the brownstone house in brooklyn new york where i grew up my mother and her friends a circle of about all four five women i used to gather the air about oh two three times a week this is after they came home from their jobs as domestics out on the flat ridge section of brooklyn and they would instead of going to a separate ways after their work day they would gather in the kitchen of my house and that was around i remember there was this large oil cloth covered table in the middle of the kitchen a sit around that table drink tea and cocoa which my sister and i had to keep them supplied with and they would talk tom brilliantly passionately about everything they didn't discuss that they talked about the world or talked about fdr who was a

great he rolled a love roosevelt they talked about marcus garvey they talked about africa they talked about whole which for them with that was that little time in the west indies they told stories they with consummate storytellers they use the mouth and language in the most brilliant way in fact the ones who were the greatest talk as among them a call now for teens and i was as little girl who could be seen but not heard by the city and not being able to say anything but taking in all of this a rich storytelling they were teaching me how to be a writer was not conscious exchange but that's what i was absorbing sitting over the in the corner listening to them they taught me for example how to make characters come alive on the page because even though i'd never met any of those white women that they worked for to flatbush by the time they get through describing them i saw them vividly

oh yeah i was very apologetic say lovey i'm also taught me how to fashion a story because they didn't tell a story in to soak up any all kind of way it always had structure and formed two and above all they trained by ear which of course is crucial for them for the writer of fiction they trained it had to appreciate at the beauty and complexity and power of ordinary commonplace speech which of course is the fiction writer stock in trade as of the whole process the whole preparation was going on they know i'm a doctor and by something as i listen to you tell about those bomb

jet ceo ford who's a songwriter as finn so use of weir's last book was it was here and i asked him where he thought came from united work for timeless german side by side both very young reporters and said that i had two great teachers in college who were great storytellers we said close my father was a druggist my mother was a school teacher and she was interested in literature and and read to me from the earliest time but she said from gaza from listening to her knees to college teachers who did not teach you to write as much as they impressed upon you the ability tell stories and insight on topics not much violence flares second star alex haley i asked the same question of

him when he was here and he told about the front porch and intimacy and growing up very young listening to the older generation women mostly but also some men the album mostly women and you know i guess everybody come from the same to the same point is successful storytellers from different points in the background but but it does strike me that when the beer is true voice that is a talent that finally began as well as post written recently began badly for me our long before and i saw a pre literate days long before i could make out the first word in that and to contain inspire your primary or before i could kind of write my name in these huge

wobbly block letters my ear already attuned to women's voices telling this story in their own way and that has stayed with me over the years but then of course i graduated from the oral tradition of the kitchen to the written word and found that equally fascinating and i'm a constant brand to the brooklyn public line ferro became my whole away from home and even today i went to the great updike i consider them writers who come out of the oral tradition i loved factory i loved fielding i loved dickens thomas hardy souls novels you can still see that in my right ear i take full advantage of the kind mentions of the novel its latitude i love to write huge novels i've never written a story but do you have to have a contentious relationship with editors of books some writers do and there are some managers as you may know may have heard of bell

now if you don't have the perfect for the summit of the city upon themselves to rewrite restructure recreate a story even change the direction the story came from that virtually no one again to persuade went into does that way and sometimes that advice is good and sometimes authors tell me it's the editors ego super imposing itself only of all the stuff you have had you know i would term relationship been with attitude i've only had one instance where i really had to declare in a very deliberate way that i would make any changes but aside from that one situation i've had very good relationships wasn't endorsed the wood with daughters with dr insel we're so what was the content for the conventional way out of the earth this is before the present editor who's just a great person

the kitchen and the editor of a hip hop was a person with herself as she just couldn't deal with is this kind of contemporary son of serbian are you know kind of street smart aleck young professional bright and officious good idea whether now been arrested without a male or female other she knew him from a technique that's another program for not only data backing dollars see or just a moment did you know you did no one shoe but i asked the question you know when did you know that you reveal i'm the father of a better than the man who was responsible for the pregnant i

know from the very beginning but it sided and this is this is one of the ways i approach approach fiction i like to kind of built into the tensions in the story all along i don't get it right away what i do ah details hints into nation's leading up to revelations that i don't get that at the outset because that's one of the ways that i used to kind of sustained interest to keep the reader reading but i knew from the very beginning who the father was and how are with how it was going to reveal it and all of that and he was a tough he was a revelation tougher not pleasant no it wasn't because i it might've been a little difficult to say during the first draft but once i

got enough distance from that end began almost writing the book especially in the later stages alas tracks writing the book was to wait editor would that i was not that im involved in it emotionally and he was very social implications of him that's i because i was writing those two levels are not only interested in telling the story of people who like all of us sometimes had a long and difficult struggle to really come in tomorrow to really achieve true independence and fulfill our lives i'm also looking at that same process as it works out politically and socially how do countries how their communities such as for example the african american community here or the west indian community how these fragile and depressed communities achieve short time in the true independence from power so that's always

at that that's always part of the supply that always underscoring of underlining the work it's not a book that that is designed to send social messages that the book has as i said the outset it's a wonderful story it's a great start a gripping story but the messages of i guess political messages cultural messages social messages perry writes i thought when i got to the abortion that i knew everything i got it made the point would have to struggle through the years and then you get me and i'm not going to tell viewers oh i you know the building a mystery yeah ok i'll tell you i agree what's next what's next goes all the way back to when i was that little girl in that brownstone house in brooklyn there was in the pilot on the second floor of the house an old upright piano and on top of the

piano was a photograph of this lovely little boy with a round face in little lord fauntleroy well marshall father of daughters as ben our guest on a word un were your host is then john singing this program was produced in the studios of the bbc and natural remedies