Russell Banks - Outer Banks

IT’S DIFFICULT FOR me to speak as the author of Family Life, Hamilton Stark , and The Relation of My Imprisonment , even though I did indeed write them and eventually published them under my own name. But it was so long ago, and I was such a different person then, that they seem to have been written by someone else. It’s as if the books were written, not merely by a younger version of my present self, but by a different writer altogether. He’s a man in his mid-thirties, which makes him thirty to thirty-five years younger than I am now. He’s not I, but he’s someone I happen to know rather well, almost intimately, the way one knows a much younger first cousin or a favorite godson. It’s nice that we share the same name, since I’m not ashamed of the young man, and he seems to have launched a promising career as a novelist on his own. We don’t look much alike (although there is a noticeable family resemblance around the eyes, nose, and mouth), in spite of the fact that I am bearded and have thinning white hair, and that other, much younger Russell Banks has a drooping moustache and long brown hair and wears those silly seventies-style sideburns. We’re approximately the same height, but I’m about twenty pounds heavier than he. No one today would confuse either one of us with the other.

The titles of the three separate works of fiction in this book are his. The title of the book itself is mine. I chose it, not for the pun on our shared surname, but because in the life and career of their author they are like low-lying offshore islands, barrier-islands, perhaps — a half-submerged archipelago marking where once, way back in the 1970s, the continent met the sea. A young or beginning writer spends a great deal of time mapping the extensions and limits of his imagination. Some finish the job in a matter of weeks or months and, having quickly charted their personally owned territory and its coastline, are able to commence their life’s work. The young man who wrote these three novels (two of which might better be counted as novellas), took a bit longer than most before getting his map made. He took about twenty years. From his late teens to his late thirties. These works represent an essential part of that process.

Banks came to writing, to the idea of being a fiction writer, hesitantly at best and in a tentative, indirect way. It was not something he felt born or even inclined to do. He did know by the age of eighteen that he wanted to be an artist, a visual artist, even though he had never visited a museum or gallery and had never actually met an artist of any kind. He and I back then had not yet come to know each other, naturally, so he had no one in the family to model himself on, no template against which to measure his nascent ambitions and fears. As a child he had displayed a talent for painting and drawing, and had received attention and praise for his pictures from family, teachers, and other adults. It was as if he had a gift for walking on his hands, however, or juggling — a remarkable thing, yes, but not something a smart boy would make his life’s work. Certainly not a boy from a working class family in rural New England in the 1940s. Still, he persisted in dreaming of becoming an artist — whatever that was. He did know that making pictures was more like play than work, which was good. He did not want to spend his life doing work, certainly not the kind of work done by his father, uncles, and grandfathers and their friends — plumbers, carpenters, laborers, loggers. Their work seemed mostly to leave them exhausted and angry and resentful of men who sat in offices all day. They growled about their work and at the same time worried that someone would take it away from them.

At eighteen, with his family already busted apart by alcoholism, violence, and divorce, Banks packed a duffle and left home, hitchhiking south, intending somehow to learn how to be an artist and hoping along the way to join Fidel Castro and his men in the mountains of Cuba. It was January 1959. He had a copy of Jack Kerouac’s recently published On the Road in his duffle and an issue of Life magazine containing an article by a reporter named Herbert Matthews that glorified the young Cuban revolutionaries’ effort to overthrow the brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista. At that age, Russell Banks was a late-arriving beatnik with an adolescent boy’s romantic, self-defining affection for the underdog, which he mistook for politics. In a rented room in Miami he drew pictures and made small paintings and tried to figure out how to get across to Cuba and up into the Sierra Maestra Mountains without Batista’s people noticing. He had not begun to write yet. He had not really begun to read yet.

In early February 1959, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and their merry men rode into Havana in triumph and no longer needed the help of a skinny artistic kid from New England who couldn’t speak Spanish anyhow. So he got a job moving furniture in a hotel. Fell in love with a girl named Darlene. Married Darlene at nineteen and became a father at twenty. Worked as a display artist and sign-painter at Webb’s City, an early box-store in St. Petersburg, Florida. Divorced at twenty-one. Then Boston, New York, Los Angeles, New Hampshire, and Islamorada Key. On the run in a stolen car in Mexico with an ex-con and an AWOL sailor he’d met in a card game in a brothel in Key West. By now, however, he had begun to read. Recklessly, randomly, omnivorously — with an appetite that fed on itself. And where before he had spent his free hours painting pictures, Banks was now writing poems and making up stories. Thanks to public libraries and the bookmobiles that cruised once a week down the Florida Keys, he had fallen in love this time with literature and like a clever monkey was trying to imitate what he loved.

His first writings aped the modernist poets, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, whose work was impenetrable to him and thus seemed easy to imitate. Wider reading gradually aided penetration, but made imitation rather more difficult. He tried Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Hemingway. Same thing — as long as he hadn’t a clue as to what he was imitating, it was easy. As soon as he began to comprehend the source of the greatness of these works, they became sui generis. So he went to their sources: Yeats, Whitman, and Baudelaire for the poets; Melville, Flaubert, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky for the novelists. And so on, working backward in time, like an archeologist excavating an ancient, layered city with only a whisk broom and tin spoon for tools.

What I’m making here is a portrait of the artist as a young autodidact. Untutored, without guidance or even a freshman English syllabus, the literary-minded autodidact tends to seat everyone he reads at the same table, with Edgar Lee Masters placed next to Sappho, Edgar Rice Burroughs alongside Tolstoy, and Will and Ariel Durant cheek by jowl with Herodotus. Randomness in reading has its rewards and advantages, to be sure, but it brings with it a nagging suspicion that along the way many of the essential texts — those that every properly educated man or woman has studied — have been missed. And often with that suspicion comes an insecurity that generates a desire, expressed by a tell-tale intellectual and literary strut, to show off what one has not missed. I sense in these early works of Russell Banks a bit of that. He seems to want to alert us to the breadth of his reading and its high level of literary sophistication. We can see that he’s read his Laurence Sterne, his Gertrude Stein, and his John Bunyan and Robert Burton. We can see that he enjoys fable and allegory as much as self-referential metafiction. We are invited to believe that he is, above all, a literary man .