Your story “The Quiet House” follows a decades-long friendship between two women, which begins when they are undergraduates and is still going when they’re in their seventies. Geraldine and Jane are quite different people. Do you think that there is something more than shared experiences that keeps them in each other’s lives for so long?
Oh, yes. Shared experiences by themselves won’t do it. Between these two, there is much more. There is a match of sensibility, of attention to things, even though in many ways they are unalike. I would say that each one trusts the other to see what there is to see and to understand it—despite all the evasions and indirections that make their personalities complex and give their relationship its purchase and flavor. If their connection were frictionless, it would be merely bland, commonplace. This affinity of insight—I’d say that’s what makes for the deep and rich connection of a real friendship, or, for that matter, a real romance. There’s an odd but wonderful image in Henry James’s “Wings of the Dove,” in which, if I’m remembering it correctly, Merton and Kate feel their affinity as though each had climbed a ladder to see out of the garden of their own life and met the other at the top of the wall, looking over.
At the center of the story is Mattie Szymanski, an older fellow-student who travelled with the friends in Europe one summer. Why do you think Geraldine’s memories of him are so vivid fifty years later, and why does Jane deny that they are vivid for her?
Mattie was somebody; he wasn’t nobody. His life—including the disappointments of its later years, his diminishment, and then his pointless early death—added up to something significant. After someone dies, you’re able, for the first time, to see the whole of that person’s story: you see its arc; you appreciate its poignancy and its power. When the idea for “The Quiet House” occurred to me, I was keen to write about how, as you grow older, you attain this long view. Less submerged in becoming, you begin to make out more clearly the forms and shapes of your past experiences. The girls loved Mattie for a reason. There’s an irony that sees past their youthful infatuation with him, and then there’s a deeper movement than irony, which restores the importance of those past experiences, gives them back their momentousness. Mattie was an original, although he was also the product of a particular place and time and politics. He was genial, fearless, generous in his appetites. He really taught the girls things—and how else do we learn, except from other people? He taught them, for instance, to look at the paintings in Venice, and opened up those reserves of meaning in their lives forever. Both the girls, when they were young, wanted romance with Mattie, yet that impulse turns out, in retrospect, to have been beside the point. It wasn’t as a lover that he mattered for them.
As for why Jane denies the power in this past that Geraldine asserts? She has probably really not thought so much about Mattie. She’s had a happier marriage, a busier career; she’s less alone, and she feels less charitable toward the memory of Mattie, more skeptical. All our reflections on the past, if they are genuine efforts to remember, take the form of an argument, not a fixed narrative. Where Geraldine rashly asserts, Jane pushes back. Perhaps the risks that Geraldine takes—if only in thought—perturb Jane. She doesn’t want her friend to indulge in sentimentality or falsity, for instance. And, although Jane’s denials annoy Geraldine slightly, they’re also the corrective she needs, in order to get as close to the truth as she can. The story-making that the women do between them is a bit like writing. The light in which we look backward is flickering and uncertain; the forms we make out are blurred. We’re guessing and interpreting, composing stories of our past selves and our times. It’s better, in the end, to do it through debate and resistance and unease, than through consensus and certainty.
Do you think that Mattie himself was as fascinating a person as he seems to Geraldine, looking back?
We can presume that Mattie wasn’t anywhere near as certain of himself as he appeared to those young girls. They needed him to be so worldly and all-knowing and impervious, for their own purposes. They required masculinity—at that point in their lives—to be a sort of bulwark. (And perhaps, as Geraldine suggests at one point, masculinity became a bulwark, to some extent, because they required it.) In the past, this imbalance of power could be a refuge for women; they could tuck themselves away safely, at least for a while, inside the greater wisdom of their men. Jane and Geraldine, of course, grew out of this positioning long before we see them chattering away over Felix’s fish soup, dominating the conversation.
We know that Mattie had his own doubts and flaws—which the girls couldn’t see at the time—because of the mess he made of his life afterward. And perhaps we have one clue to his self-doubt in how broken he was by his father’s death. But these fault lines in the man don’t need to diminish the wisdom of which he was also capable. Everything’s provisional, imperfect . . . especially wisdom.
Memory is very much at the center of the story—the strangeness of what we retain, what we forget, and what we repress. How challenging is it to capture the work of memory and the passage of time in fiction?
I think it is hard. Is it possible that the power of memory writes white on the page? It can be so dull in life when elderly (or not so elderly) people drone on about the past—and yet, you can see how those memories burn and glow in their imaginations. Oh, that wallpaper, that bowl of fudge, that Ford Cortina, those folk albums!!! What works best in a story is now, the infinite content of the lived moment, made vivid and sensuous in words. It’s difficult to convey the power of memory, inside that lived present. Deborah, when I first sent this to you, you encouraged me to write more of Jane and Geraldine’s present, and it’s a better story because of that. Thank you!
Yet the writer does have this great liberty, in fiction, of placing segments of the present and the past alongside each other on the page, as if they can both be alive side by side, in consecutive moments. It’s a kind of sleight of hand, really—not possible in lived experience! (And not to be overused in fiction, either.) This is one of the ways in which I tried to convey the power of the women’s memories. It’s not, of course, quite how real memory works. And I did make an attempt to capture, too, how thoughts of the past actually excite and animate Geraldine in her present: they make her sit up in bed; no doubt her heart beats faster; she’s filled up with them. . . . It’s been an interesting experiment.
The story also presents some snapshots of twentieth-century feminism in development. As students, Geraldine and Jane felt inferior to the intellectual men around them, imprisoned by their physical reality, and always aware of how men were perceiving them, never unself-conscious. As women in their seventies, they seem to have fully claimed their own independence and self-sufficiency—or haven’t they?
I think they’re absolutely finished with that youthful idea that the men’s intellectual lives were more authentic than theirs. It was seductive, when they were young, to believe that men were superior, to worship them, to feel that their own lives were lived for the men’s gaze, which vindicated them. It was a bit ridiculous, but it displaced fulfillment away from them and onto that male other, whose approval and validation they lived for. This is an interesting game to play with power and submission, authority. But that idea has simply fallen away from them, would be impossible for them to believe now. No doubt that’s part of the history of feminism—real, profound change in our collective perception—in the decades they’ve lived through. No doubt it’s also a natural result of their growing up, losing their illusions, and gaining experience and insight. No doubt, too, there was some disappointment and loss in the change, as well as, mostly, gain. But these two strong women would have grown bored with submission quite quickly. They were bound to take hold of their rightful authority and live it out. And I suppose that constitutes independence and self-sufficiency, as far as it goes. I’m not sure it’s really part of the human condition to be truly independent or self-sufficient. We all need each other. Geraldine and Jane need each other. And think how passionately they talk about their children.
These women are a few years older than you. Do you think you put something of yourself into either—or both—of them?
My material’s drawn out of a scrap bag of fragments, and by the end of writing a story I can hardly remember which fragments are my own and which are invented. I can see bits of bossy Jane in myself and bits of weepy Geraldine, but I’m definitely not either of them. They offered themselves to my imagination in the obliging way that characters do. I begin with a few details and then at some magical point they seem to attain to their own lives. Names always help. I was very pleased when I came up with “Jane Rawlings, née Piggott.” And that swatch of her gray-white hair. I had her then.
“The Quiet House” ends with Mattie’s sort of paean to the power of words to define life: “All that counted were those occasions when you picked up a book and opened it and its words attached themselves to that moment and transfigured it.” Do you agree with him?
I knew before I began writing that the story would end with this. I love the way realist fiction can think about ideas, weave them into its representations, embody them. I’m arguing for an idea here, at the same time that I’m trying to capture a moment.
And, yes, this is what I believe. Like Mattie, I’m not a completist. I don’t grieve over all the books I’ve never read. I don’t care about finishing books if I’m not enjoying them. Reading is nothing if not for pleasure. And my life has been lived in reading. Plenty of living: but always with the words and stories in novels and poetry and songs (and images from films and paintings) tangled into the textures of my daily experience. It’s not the only way to live, obviously. And the things that characters in books say matter only because it matters what people do and say and feel and understand outside of books. (A friend said something like that to me, long ago. He was also the one who said what Mattie says about picking up a book and opening it. He wasn’t Mattie! I invented Mattie.) But books have been a joy to me. They have transfigured my experience, yes. “Transfigured” is exactly the right word. ♦
