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I am thrilled today to post an interview with Jayne Anne Phillips, whose novel Lark and Termite I enjoyed thoroughly and reviewed earlier this year here. I mention all of the critical acclaim the novel has received. It has since been featured in several places, including the New York Review of Books.
I want to thank her for answering these questions!
Q: I am curious about how the idea for Lark and Termite came to you. Did the first ideas come after the news of the No Gun Ri massacre/incident broke in 1999? Was No Gun Ri integrated into an already developing idea?
I have actually been “working” on Lark and Termite, somewhat consciously, for nearly thirty years. That long ago, I was visiting a high school friend in my hometown; she’d rented a small apartment over a detached garage behind a residential house. Her window overlooked a grass alley, beautiful, quiet, tire tracks full of white stones or gravel. Several small houses fronted on the alley. There was a 1950s style lawn chair, metal, in front of the house just opposite. In it sat a boy, nine or ten, his legs folded up under him as though he couldn’t feel them; he was holding up to his face a long strip of a blue dry cleaning bag, and blowing on it, looking through it. He was clearly in his own world. I asked my friend, “Who is that, and what is he doing?” “I don’t know,” she said, “but he sits that way for hours.” The image really burned itself into me.
Years later, I went to a birthday party hosted by the American artist Mary Sherman—in Cambridge, for her boyfriend, who happened to have the same birthday as me. I was looking at her sketchbook and admired a particular drawing, and because it was my birthday, she ripped the page out and gave it to me. The drawing is the one that appears in the American edition of Lark and Termite, opposite the title page. She had written “Termite” across the top, with some illegible writing; the drawing reminded me so of the boy, and he became Termite in my mind at that time. I wasn’t really thinking of a book, but I carried the drawing, framed, around with me, moving it house to house.
The novel began with my question of so long ago, and incorporated birthdays as part of its mystery. Lark’s first words, first section, were the beginning, and she begins with the chair, the alley, the town; she says who Termite is, what he’s like, what she knows and doesn’t know. I consciously set the book in 1959 so that he would not be “diagnosed,” labeled, figured out. The chair I originally saw suggested that time, and the silence. Lark tells us that his father was killed in Korea, which was the war of the 50s, and she tells us they “never got his body back.” She goes on to describe how Termite loves big sounds, storms, the double railroad tunnel by the river, when the trains go over on the tracks above, the train yard. I had a strong sense of the look of the tunnel, which is a common sight in West Virginia—those stone structures, bridges, tunnels, built during the Depression by the WPA.
This novel was kismet from the beginning. I had written at least Lark’s and Nonie’s first sections of the book before September 1999, when the AP broke the story of No Gun Ri. A large color photo on the front page showed the tunnel, from above, over the should of a survivor in a pale pink suit. I just wish I could meet that woman some day. At any rate, I recognized the shape, the space, the tunnel, immediately, and knew that was what happened to Leavitt, Termite’s father. The parallel worlds of the book began building and layering.
Q: In my review I make note of what looked like the obvious influence of William Faulkner, particularly his The Sound and the Fury, whose elements—the overlapping narratives, the sound and the fury going on in Termite’s inert body—you use in your own unique way. What other authors do you feel influenced by?
James Agee. Katherine Anne Porter. McCullers. Authors who articulate childhood, time, from deep inside.
Q: Your last novel,MotherKind, was published in 2000. Did writing Lark and Termite, published nine years later, take longer to write than your other novels? Was writing it a particular challenge?
Each novel is a particular challenge in its own way. I blame my constant multi-tasking, and it’s true that I can’t write if there are other things to be done—but, in some way, I write the way I do because I live with the material of the books for so long. They become alternate worlds, and they must be compelling enough that I can come back to them, despite time and distraction, trauma, loss, life (!) in its goodness as well—and sometimes the distance even seems to solve problems, or advance my understanding, when I enter the book again. It’s always been five to nine years between books for me.
The challenge with this one was the immense problem of all it encompasses, sustaining parallel worlds, really through language and mystery. Language is, I think, a layered mystery that encompasses history, and dimensions beyond the physical. Language is consciousness itself, which, like music, prayer, thought, is more than physical, and bridges time.
Q: On your website you have a page called “The Secret Country” which contains many photographs, letters, and other items from various time periods in which your books are set. In Lark and Termiteyou begin each day’s section with a picture from a variety of angles of the bridge at No Gun Ri. What role do these visual elements play in your writing?
I often build up a sort of artifact collection around the book I’m writing, private things that help me hang on to the work, enter the work, get inside the world that is still unknown to me. Some of the photographs on the website I discovered in hindsight. For Lark and Termite, I had a movie that I took, many years later, of the alley—it looked exactly the same, except that the house where he lived was gone, replaced by a garden.
And when I was researching No Gun Ri, I depended heavily on the AP series, which won a Pulitzer for Martha Mendoza, Charles Hanley, and Sang-Hun Choe, and did further reaserach—including emailing various travel book companies. Robert Nilsen, a writer for Sun Moon guide books, happened to be in South Korea when I reached him, and he generously volunteered to go to the tunnel and photograph it for me. The black and white, cropped versions, the color translated to black and white, are the photographs he sent me, and allowed us to use in the novel. They get tighter as we enter into Leavitt’s mind, into what’s happening to everyone in the tunnels. The post cards of Main Street (that Lark collects), the small moon pitcher Termite loves, are all things, real things, that were part of the process.
Q: You are also an acclaimed short story writer. Your first compilation, Sweathearts, was published in 1976, followed by another, Counting in 1978, and then Black Ticket in 1979. Since then you’ve written five novels, interspersed with collections of short stories. Is there a different sense of fulfillment when completing a novel than when completing a short story?
Well, yes, if only because a novel has to be sustained over such a long period, and the arc is so much longer and more complex. I loved writing stories, but I feel as though my stories and poems are inside my novels. I often publish excerpts along the way, that work as stories or focused excerpts. My books are mysteries to me—for me, material dictates form, meaning that the material teaches me how to write the book, what form the book will take.
Q: Has your work become more focused on novels?
If ind that the novel, as I conceive of it and write it, gives me the long arc of time I need in order to really enter the work. I want that long, familial form—which is never a given, and always a gamble.
Q: This might not be a fair question, but what is your favorite short story you’ve written?
I don’t play favorites! To me, the work is a continuum. Everything I’ve written had to precede what came next. It is one body of work.
Q: What are some of your favorite short stories?
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider” comes to mind, as perfection in itself, but there are dozens of stories I love.
Q: This book was set in your native West Virginia. Now that you are the director of the MFA program at Rutgers Newark, can we New Jersey residents hope to see a book set in or around this area?
Hmmmm, well, in some way, perhaps. Perhaps when I write my “academic” novel!
Q: And finally, what are three novels that you recommend we all read?
Here are four. You’ll love them. I live by them.
- A Death in the Familyby James Agee
- They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
- Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
- Fat City by Leonard Gardner
My first new book of 2009 set a high standard I hope is met by many more books written this year. Lark and Termite (2009) received an extremely positive review from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times daily. Just a couple of weeks later, the New York Times Book Review, which runs independent of the daily book reviews, also gave a positive review. On that same day, the Washington Post printed yet another positive review. Who can resist reading such a highly praised book? Who can know if that praise will set up unattainable expectations, making the book less than expected, and therefore disappointing?
The book begins on July 26, 1950. On the other side of the world from where he left his pregnant wife Lola, Corporal Robert Leavitt is directing a group of soldiers and Korean civilians in a plan to help the Korean civilians escape advancing North Korean forces. As he walks, Leavitt straddles two worlds: the immediate, urgent world of the war and the march and the vaulted, dreamy (indeed, visionary) world of home where his wife is expecting the child to be born any day. The narrative shifts from one world to the other almost seamlessly, rendering an almost halucinogenic effect similar to what I felt in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (O’Brien, incidentally, said that Lark and Termite is the best book he’s read in the last five years). And even as the narrative of what’s going on in Leavitt’s head, Phillips keeps the reader focused on the setting by pausing the narrative with haunting descriptions:
Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war’s insistence everyone move on.
While directing the civilians, Leavitt sees a young Korean girl holding an apparently blind and perhaps handicapped Korean boy. The girl is refusing to walk because next to her is an old Korean woman who refuses to move. The girl cannot handle this old woman and the young child. Leavitt, disregarding the instructions he had just voiced to his men (“Monitor, do not assist.”), goes over to help. The narrative pauses, momentarily, as the young boy is briefly introduced. There is no doubt the boy is blind, as his eyes are covered by a blue film. However, the boy seemed hyper-aware of what was going on and sensed before anyone the coming onslaught.
Moving quickly, edging through, he feels the boy’s small body go rigid, his apprehension heighten to a nearly audible pitch; Leavitt imagines the clear, high tone of a tuning fork struck in midair. It’s that kind of focus, emotionless and pure, so sharply true that nothing else exists.
Bullets fly all around as U.S. planes begin strafing the area, wounding Leavitt as he runs with the three Koreans into a tunnel where they become trapped by paranoid friendly fire. When Leavitt is wounded, the borders between reality and halucination disappear and the boundaries of perceived reality give way to another sensation of reality.
The book then proceeds to July 26, 1959 and introduces three other main characters who will narrate portions of the book. Lark, Termite, and Nonie reside in West Virginia. It doesn’t take too long before we understand the family dynamic. Termite, now nine, is the baby Leavitt never gets to meet. He’s severely handicapped. Some characters don’t believe he understands a thing about what is going on. Lark, however, believes he does even if he doesn’t experience it in the same way and even if he cannot express it the same way. Lark, seventeen, is Termite’s half-sister, Lola”s daughter from another relationship. Nonie is Lola’s sister, and all we see suggests that Lola is out of the picture and that Nonie has been raising both children as if they’re her own.
She chuckles and shakes her head. “Poor Lola, gone so long and still the elephant in the room. She got what she wanted, in a way. Well out of it and still pulling the strings.”
“There aren’t any strings,” I tell Elise. “There’s just what happened.”
“There’s Lark,” Elise says, “and there’s Termite.”
She offers me a cigarette and I take it. We stand here smoking, adjusting to the heat.
There are several ties to William Faulkner throughout the book. Indeed, one of its three epigrams is from The Sound and the Fury. And like that novel, Lark and Termite divides its chapters into discreet narratives from the perspective of one of the main characters – and one of the characters is severely handicapped. Also, a running theme in Faulkner is the tie between the generations. However, where Faulkner seemed to focus on how the sins of the fathers affects later generations, Phillips shows a more touching and perhaps deeper connection between the generations. In her novel, the characters seem to feel each other across the ether of time and space. This renders an effect that is at once haunting and touching. Here is a small passage where the connection between Termite and the Korean boy is particularly apparent:
Gently, she turns the boy’s head so that his gaze falls unseeing on Leavitt’s face. The uneven blue of his pupils is impenatrable, depthless and cloudy, but the blue seems quietly, deeply lit. The blue never wavers. What does he see behind it. Shadows. Sounds. Leavitt doesn’t ask but the boy inclines his head as though to answer.
And now, to Termite’s time:
There’s a picture inside the roar, a tunnel inside the tunnel. He’s been here before and he looks deeper each time and he sees. There are sleepers everywhere, bodies crowded together. The bodies are always here, so many of them in the tunnel when the train roars across above, bodies spilled and still, barely stirring. The train pulls and lifts and shows them and lets them move. They know he sees them but they cannot see or say. No sounds, just the roar, lifting them with their eyes still closed, turning them over like the pages of a book.
Also, much like Faulker, the events in the novel remove themselves from the sphere of straight narrative and become something not so much abstract as mythical. A tunnel is a womb and a tomb. A pending rainstorm brings a scourging and purging flood. One is struck by the power of such images. Further, music and sound run through the novel just as much as the words on the page. Phillips utilizes the feel of sound and injects it into the books form, giving the novel some wonderful texture.
Jayne Anne Phillips has graciously agreed to answer a few questions I put to her, but she’s been busy on her book tour and has not been able to finish the interview quite yet. Hopefully in the near future her interview will appear here.
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