Hello to the Cannibals
by Richard Bausch
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 688
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060930802
Publisher: HarperCollins
Richard Bausch's other books include Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea, Rebel Powers, Violence, and The Last Good Time. He is the recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife, Karen, and their five children in rural Virginia.
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Q: The lives of Lily and Mary Kingsley each contain enough material for a novel apiece. Why did you choose to combine their stories?
RB: They chose me. I was writing about Lily, thinking to construct a novel about long friendship (Lily and Dominic) and Mary walked in and wouldn't leave. That is honestly the way it feels. I had before this only the knowledge that Evan S. Connell so charmingly imparts about her in an essay called "The Aztec Treasure House," which was a chapter in his fine book The Long Desire.
Q: From the very start of the novel, you offer your readers an intimate glimpse of your heroines' lives, expertly relaying their thoughts and fears, hopes and desires. How did you get to know these characters? Was the process different from that of your previous novels?
RB: It is always about imagining with me. And the process is always a kind of feeling through -- with the body and the mind. What does the experience FEEL like on the nerves, and how does it affect the inner life? It was slightly different this time with Mary because this was an actual lived life I was dealing with. But once I had the facts, then it was a matter of imagining myself into the experience. For instance, the biographies talk about the event where Mary reads in the London papers of the Little Big Horn massacre, with knowledge from a letter sent earlier that her father was headed out to join Custer. The biographies say Mary and her mother and brother led a tense few days until another letter arrived from her father saying that he had been prevented from joining Custer because of bad weather. To make it palpable, I imagined the sensations and the ensuing scenes of terror and confusion upon the reading of the newspaper account of the massacre. That is, I tried to render the experience, using what I knew of the facts.
Q: How did you become aware of the life and accomplishments of Mary Kingsley? Why did you choose her as a heroine?
RB: As I said earlier, it feels as if I wasn't the one doing the choosing. And I should add that this is how all the characters I've ever written about have presented themselves to me. They walk into my consciousness and then leave the imprint of themselves and I spend the whole time of composing the story or the novel trying to recover the fullest sense of what left the imprint in the first place.
Q: Please tell us a little bit about the novel's structure and about your use of journal entries, correspondence, and scenes from a play to support your narrative. How do you decide which form is appropriate for the kind of information you want to reveal?
RB: I wish I could say it was always a conscious choice. It's more like someone playing a guitar, feeling one's way through the music and trying different chords, different patterns of notes, different tempos, and so on. Going with what feels right and willing to be wrong about it a lot, and stubborn enough to keep on with it until it does shape itself as it seems best suited for the purposes of the story.
Q: Why did you decide to make the theatre a critical part of Lily's life? Do you have any personal involvement with the theater?
RB: I had a little experience as an actor when I was younger, and my two daughters are involved in community theater here in Virginia. Mostly I knew many of the best playwrights had theater in their background -- I think of O'Neill's actor father, for instance. I want the reader to have the sense that Mary will go on to be a very good playwright indeed. And that's why we get only a very little (and draft material at that) of Lily's play--since I myself am no playwright.
Q: Is there any historical figure, or any figure from your own past, who has affected you the way Mary Kingsley affected Lily?
RB: I love biography, and read a lot of it. But, well, Mary. I felt sometimes, writing lines for her, as if she was standing over my shoulder, shaking her head. "No, no," I hear her say, kindly but firm, "I wouldn't 'ave said it that way at all, not at all. You poor sod."
Q: The canvas for your novels seems to be expanding; they are increasingly complex, and each successive novel covers larger historic and geographical landscapes than the preceding one. Is this a conscious choice? Where will your next novel take you?
RB: I can't say, because I don't know where they'll take me. I'm working on two novels at present. One, a shorter one, called "Heart's Ease" is a love-comedy of errors kind of thing, about a man who doesn't know how happy he is. The other is about the suicide of a young girl, and is constructed as a series of taped interviews and transcripts of interviews. That one is called "Report on the Recent Disturbance."
Excerpted from Hello to the Cannibals © Copyright 2008 by Richard Bausch. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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