On Agate Hill
by Lee Smith

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 1565125770
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Lee Smith is the author of twelve novels as well as three collections of stores,. Her previous novel, The Last Girls, was a New York Times bestseller as well as a co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award The recipient of an Academy Award in Fiction form the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, Smith lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

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A Conversation with the Author


Q: There are so many narrative layers to your novel, including, of course, the rich historical material. How much research did you do in the writing of On Agate Hill? And what was the process? Did you do research first and then write or did you do research as you were writing?

LS: I’d never thought about writing a historical novel in my life. The only time I’d ever used history in my previous books was when I was writing about the lives of the older mountain women I was privileged to grow up among—lives I consid-ered heroic and wrote about in novels such as Fair and Tender Ladies and Oral History.

But then my husband and I moved into a very old house next to a Civil War cemetery in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where we found heartbreakingly short dates and “C.S.A.” carved into many of its mossy stones. I started walking my dogs in this cemetery at dusk, trying to imagine these lives. And I visited the county historical museum right down on the corner and its friendly curator, Dr. Ernest Dollar, a recent PhD from the Southern studies program down in Chapel Hill—a young man on fire with history. Ernie gave me a dusty diary kept by a young girl in boarding school in the 1870s. “You might be interested in this,” he said.

But best of all was the old man who came knocking on our front door before we had even unpacked our stacked-up boxes. “Honey,” he rasped, wheezing and leaning on his cane, “Let me in. I’ve got to tell you a story about your house”—the words every novelist is dying to hear! It turned out to be a story about obses-sive love, which in turn came to obsess me.


Q: So what was the next step?

LS: I started reading and couldn’t quit. I read for a couple of years, immersing myself in books, letters, diaries, and journals about the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. First it was a pleasure, then an addiction. I was especially fascinated to learn how many, many Southerners of all races and stations were refugees of one kind or another, displaced by the war. The roads were clogged. Everybody was on the move. Everybody was far from home. This sense of displacement reso-nated with me. It reminded me of an old gospel song I used to hear while I was growing up, “I am a pilgrim and a stranger, traveling o’er this wearisome land.”

Finally I realized that I was going to write a novel.


Q: Talk a bit about Tuscany. At what point did she make her entrance? Did she in-troduce herself to you before Molly did?

LS: Tuscany is always with me, sort of an alter ego, I guess (I was once Miss Bitumi-nous Coal). Some readers hate Tuscany because they think she is such a ditz, but I have to confess, I love her. Here, she and Molly have some character traits in common, I think. They are both spunky girls who make some bad choices, and they both come through hard times to a new understanding of their lives.

But I put Tuscany in this book for another—and very important—reason, as well. As a founding fellow at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies and a lifelong oral historian, I have always been struck by the haphazard, arbitrary na-ture of history. History doesn’t care who finds it, you know. It might just as well be Tuscany as, say, Arthur Schlesinger, or any other famous historian. And what we come to accept as historical truth—the official version—depends entirely on what information happens to come to light, and how: who finds it, who interprets it, how it is disseminated and publicized . . . and who knows how many boxes or artifacts and documents are sitting right now up under how many eaves, just wait-ing to be discovered by a carpenter? This idea has always fascinated me.


Q: There’s a heartbreaking ballad at the pivotal moment in the story. Did you write this ballad yourself?

LS: The ballad form comes naturally to me, perhaps because I grew up on ballads and stories. Sometimes I think that our sense of language is forever formed by how we first heard speech—by who was talking to us, or singing to us, and under what circumstances and how they sounded. My sense of narrative was formed by sit-ting out on the porch listening to stories and songs, often sung or told by some-body who loved me. So I am more of a storyteller than a writer, in a way, and On Agate Hill is more like a ballad than a book—it’s episodic; it’s tragic and violent; its themes are the classic ballad themes of love, loss, and betrayal; and there are various kinds of repetitions holding it together.


Q: That probably explains the intimate way the novel unfolds. But what inspired the moments of magic realism—Molly and her best friend see fairies, for instance; the farm animals kneel at Christmas; and Virgil and Old Bess fly away over the snow.

LS: Well, a novelist is like a magpie—you are always gathering up bright little bits of memory or lore or information. Over time this becomes a “habit of being,” to use Flannery O’Connor’s term. Sometimes you’re not even aware of it—but then when you need it, there it is. I didn’t consciously set out to write magic realism; those moments just happened while I was in the act of writing those scenes. If I think hard, though, I know where two of them came from: my best friend and I really did believe that we saw fairies in the woods when we were little girls, and there is an old Appalachian legend that all the farm animals kneel wherever they are, in the barn or the pasture, at midnight on Christmas Eve. As for Virgil and Old Bess, that was a complete surprise to me. I could see them rise up over the snow in my mind’s eye as they left Agate Hill. Months later, while I was visiting my son and his family in Nashville, I was amazed to pick up a book of plantation history and read that the flying slave is a familiar motif—an obvious emblem of freedom—in slave narratives. So, go figure.


Q: How incredibly satisfying that must have been! Was that the most surprising thing that happened in the course of writing the book?

LS: It was one of the most surprising things that happened in the book—and a harbin-ger of things to come. Sometimes, if a novelist has done her homework (so she doesn’t have to break the flow by stopping to look up a date, for instance, or fig-ure out what color somebody’s hair was back in chapter one), she gets very, very lucky: the characters really do take over, and the book takes on a thrilling life of its own, and all you have to do is hold on to your hat! Or your pen, or your com-puter, as the case might be. Just show up for work and wait with bated breath to find out what’s going to happen next. It’s like transcribing rather than writing. This has only happened to me twice before, but it happened here. I was aston-ished (and very moved) by the last part of the novel. I mean, I knew that Molly would return to Agate Hill, but I never suspected the turns that her life would take there, or even the very existence of Juney. He just appeared like a blessing in the end.


Q: As Molly took over, did you find yourself judging her or disagreeing with her actions? Or any of the other characters’, for that matter?

LS: Of course, there’s a part of me that is practically screaming, “Don’t do it, honey!” when she runs off with Jacky . . . that same part of me that desperately wanted her to marry Ben Valiant, such a fine young man, or even the more dubious Hender-son Hanes, who could have at least offered her some measure of security, which she has never had. But Molly is off on a different journey, one that will take her from being a “ghost girl” hidden away in her cubbyhole, chronicling rather than participating in her own life, to a “real girl” who will finally “give all her heart” and “live as hard and love so much I will use myself all the way up like a candle.” It’s that old question, whether one should follow the head or the heart. Molly makes her own choices and takes control of her own life, for better or worse, a hard thing for a woman to do in those times, and I admire her for it. I’ve always been kind of a candle girl myself.


Q: Did you keep a journal while you were growing up? Do you keep one now?

LS: I did keep a little official diary, with a lock and key, when I was a child. Now I fill up notebook after notebook with not only my own experiences and observa-tions but also with sketches, notes on whatever I’m reading, story ideas, place descriptions, lines of dialogue overheard in the line at the grocery store, whatever hits me. Lists, recipes, and phone numbers often appear in these pages, too. Ob-viously, I’m a born scribbler! So the diary format comes natural to me. And since I had steeped myself in diaries of the period, Molly’s more formal language came natural, too. I have always loved the diary form anyway, for the intimacy it im-mediately establishes with the reader and the instantaneous character develop-ment it affords. I love to read diaries as well as write them.


Q: Reviewers have compared On Agate Hill to Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, even to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! In what ways have these books informed or not informed your novel? Are there certain authors or books that have shaped and influenced you as a writer?

LS: Well, I’m honored by these comparisons. Actually I have never read Anne of Green Gables, but Absalom, Absalom! and Jane Eyre are touchstones in my life—books I have read and taught several times. I’d have to say that William Faulkner has been a major influence on my work, as he has on twentieth- century writing as a whole. In twenty-five major works, he gave us twenty-five different narrative strategies, opening up the form of the novel forever. I’m sure that my fascination with first-person voice derives from him—especially from As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, with their multiple narrators. And cer-tainly his themes of race, loss, memory, place, and the importance of the past can be found here in On Agate Hill. As for Jane Eyre, one radio interviewer referred to my book as “Jane Eyre with sex”—I got a good laugh out of that, but had to admit it was not so far from the truth! There’s the boarding school section, and I suppose that Simon Black is a mysterious figure akin in some ways to Mr. Roch-ester. But Molly is very much her own girl and always has been, ever since she took pen in hand and wrote, “I am a spitfire and a burden.”


Q: Who’s got a hold of your pen now?

LS: Zelda Fitzgerald, for one. I’m researching a novella about her tragic, glamorous life right now, and I’ve got a country music star with another story waiting in the wings. I seem to be gravitating toward shorter fiction at the moment, and I’m just full of ideas, very stimulated by working in this different form for a while. So, stay tuned!





© Copyright 2012 by Lee Smith. Reprinted with permission by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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