Lenox — Author Roxana Robinson is a big fan of Edith Wharton. In fact, she once organized a marathon reading of “The House of Mirth” (1905) at the Center for Fiction (originally called the New York Mercantile Library), where 27 female fiction writers converged to read the book aloud in its entirety. “We read all night,” recalled Robinson, who will visit the Berkshires on Thursday (June 6). While Wharton drew upon her insider’s knowledge of the upper class New York “aristocracy” to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age, Robinson recently dove head first into her family’s archive at Duke University—a veritable treasure trove of primary documents from which she gleaned intimate details of her great-grandfather’s life in the post-Civil War South. “I’m delighted to be part of this series,” said Robinson in a recent phone interview; she will be joined by author Amy Bloom for a conversation Thursday, June 6, at 4 p.m. at the Mount on Robinson’s newly released novel “Dawson’s Fall,” about which Kirkus Reviews writes: “Though the story is set mainly in the 1880s, its themes are up-to-the-minute; Robinson uses lynchings, duels, and sexual assaults to shed light on populism and toxic masculinity.”
Hannah Van Sickle: What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing this book, one that delicately weaves together both the known and the unknown?
Roxana Robinson: I call it a biographical novel just to separate it from [historical fiction], a genre that has a creded other element, one of them being that, in historical fiction, people tend to feel that they can change the facts and it’s a different approach. This book is almost biography in that everything in it is based on documented evidence; wherever the font changes, the reader is aware that she is reading words written by someone else and either published or made a part of the record—and the sources are cited. It is both factual and scholarly as well as fictional; the fictional elements are only those parts of the book which include dialogue and interior monologue.
HVS: Dialogue is one of the most compelling parts of any novel; what allowed you to create the dialogue and interior monologues from a bygone era so accurately—one from which anyone living today is estranged?
RR: I was really intrigued by Hilary Mantel’s books “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” because she uses dialogue in both books, and it seems very contemporary. Every once in a while there’s an anachronism, but for the most part, it feels as though they are people you might meet on the street who happened to live four centuries earlier. It’s a kind of magic trick. Part of the problem with historical fiction is that the more precise you are as a scholar, the more you may tend to use stilted and formal language as dialogue because the only source we have for that period—whatever it is—is written. But of course people didn’t speak the way they wrote, just the way we may not. So I was trying to find a middle ground because everybody, in every era, speaks—in intimate situations—quickly, opaquely; they’ll be funny, they’ll be caustic, and those are things that they don’t write down. I was trying to reach beyond the written record, and I was fortunate in that subject because I had so much intimate family material: I had Sarah [Morgan’s] diary; I had the love letters between [Sarah and Francis Warrington Dawson]; and [Dawson’s] letters to his family. So I could find the most informal and private forms of expression that [my great-grandparents] had given us. Since I am a descendent [of the main characters], I also have a sense of family culture which was passed on from generation to generation so I could understand it in ways that I would not have been able to understand someone who was not related to me. Those were my sources, and I went [to great lengths] to ensure that I was giving the reader a real sense of that moment for those people.
HVS: Your book is set in 1889—over a century ago—and yet the themes that permeate the pages seem timely and very relevant, almost in an uncanny way. To what extent did similar contemporary issues, swirling about as you wrote, influence the writing of your book?
RR: When I started the book, five or six years ago, these things were not so prevalent. I was really interested in the subject of slavery and—on my mother’s side I have Harriet Beecher Stowe—so I sort of felt that subject was closed for me, that my family had already dealt with it, and I didn’t really have much new to say. I applaud her work, and it was very influential, but what could I add to that? I also began to be interested in my father’s side and here was a man who had come to this country, having taken a huge step of leaving his own country, taking a perilous trip across the ocean, to fight for the slave states—and he was a man of great principle. We were proud of him: He founded a newspaper which became a very important voice of the New South; he was a progressive; he was a liberal; [he was ] a man of principle who believed in the rule of law and was a devout Catholic and wouldn’t carry a gun after the war. So what was he thinking? And that became a larger question: How was it possible that the South—that encompassed this huge region, and this huge white population—for all of them to be complicit in something that was unconscionable? And it’s not possible that every single person in that landscape would be cruel and brutal and psychopathic and inhumane. What was this system—what was the philosophy—that allowed people of good intentions and good will and principle and generous hearts to be complicit in a system that was based on inhumanity? As I wrote the book, which took me five years, to my distress, this subject became more and more relevant to today.
HVS: When you come to the Berkshires, it will be to have a conversation with Amy Bloom at the Mount; how does the experience of a writer like Edith Wharton, a contemporary during the time period about which you write, bring another layer to this conversation?
RR: Wharton is a huge favorite of mine and always has been. I’ve written a lot about her—and edited “The New York Stories of Edith Wharton” (New York Review Books Classics, 2007)—so she is a big influence on me. But Wharton wrote about an almost entirely white world, and her New York was based on a completely different system of politics. And it had to do with a very insular, central group of people of privilege and influence—not necessarily money, but influence. And it was a white society, so the issue of race didn’t really enter into her world. So although she as a presence is always a part of my consciousness as a writer, this particular issue wasn’t hers.
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Robinson and Bloom’s conversation will focus on the process of writing biographical fiction by taking a close look at Robinson’s newest novel. Set in Charleston, South Carolina, and based on the life of her great-grandfather Frank Dawson, Robinson’s use of published accounts, family journal entries and letters tells a compelling story of one man’s attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social and moral landscape. “I’m thrilled to have such highly regarded authors in conversation at the Mount,” said Michelle Daly, the Mount’s public programs director. “By weaving biographical fact with narrative fiction, both Robinson and Bloom bring history alive on the page.” This event will explore Robinson’s research and writing processes, as well as the challenges of merging biography with fiction. The event will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday, June 6, in the Stable; the conversation will be followed by a book-signing session.
Robinson is the author of nine books: five novels, including “Cost”; three collections of short stories; and the biography “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BookForum, Best American Short Stories, Tin House and elsewhere. She teaches in the Hunter MFA program and divides her time among New York, Connecticut and Maine. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was president of the Authors Guild from 2014 to 2017.
Bloom is the author of two New York Times best-sellers and three collections of short stories, a children’s book and a ground-breaking collection of essays. She’s been a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in “Best American Short Stories,” “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards,” and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, O Magazine and Vogue, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into 15 languages.
