On Monday I posted my review of Frances and Bernard, a book I found to be witty, sharp, and deep. A complex look at love and friendship between two writers. As often happens when I enjoy a book this much I want to know more about the author and their process. Here then is a Q&A session with Carlene Bauer, conducted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publishers of Frances and Bernard.
A Conversation with Carlene Bauer
Why did you decide to write the novel in letters?
After a draft using the third person omniscient, I had the realization that if I wrote the novel in letters the book would come to life, because it would consist of two very strong voices in a struggle, and you would feel the struggle more keenly, I hoped, because of the intimacy of the form.
Also, it was a book of letters that inspired and helped me frame one of the main conflicts. In Words In Air, the collected correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, I’d been struck by an exchange in which Lowell, ever the grandiose effuser, tells Bishop that she was “the one might have been for him,” and Bishop, a lesbian, answers that declaration with a chastening, pointed silence. That moment for me was incredibly rich and poignant with comedy and tragedy. Poor Robert Lowell, that he could not or would not see what window he was flying straight into; poor Elizabeth Bishop for having to clean up yet another pile of broken glass on her floor. I thought: what would it be like to be an aloof, reserved, private woman like Bishop—like O’Connor—and be caught up in the possibly delusional passion of someone like Lowell? And what if you created a portrait of that relationship through letters?
How was writing in letters different, and perhaps more intimate?
Letters require that you get to the heart of the matter. You can dispense with elements of traditional narrative whenever you want, because that is what often happens in letters. No need for scene setting, no need to anchor the dialogue in tedious volleys of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. (At least they were feeling tedious to me!) Also, I thought letters would be a more forgiving form in which to tell a love story: everyone understands that letters are the place where you say rash things, wild things, sweet things, silly things. Unforgivable things—whether they’re unforgivable because they’re swollen with passion, or unforgivable because they’re afire with rage. Letters allow for heightened emotions, and they would also allow for a bit more drama, maybe—in the space of two letters a world could change, and the plot could thicken instantly. I wish I could say that the form felt familiar to me because I was a champion letter writer, but alas, I’m a champion writer of letters that never got sent.
How closely are the characters based on their inspirations?
Frances and Bernard hold more than a passing resemblance to their real-life inspirations, the writers Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, but they’re not carbon copies. Frances and Bernard share family, professional, religious, and educational backgrounds with O’Connor and Lowell, and I did use many events and details from O’Connor’s and Lowell’s real lives as foundation for the story and the characters. For example, Frances and Bernard meet, like O’Connor and Lowell did, at a writers’ colony (Yaddo), and Lowell did, during his first manic episode, proclaim O’Connor a saint. O’Connor did have a tussle with her publishers that led Lowell to introduce her to his editor. Bernard, like Lowell, loses his faith after his first manic episode. I also borrowed quite a bit of their temperaments and voices. But there are differences.
How did you research their relationship?
I first learned that they were friends years ago while reading Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Elie says that O’Connor fell for Lowell at Yaddo; Brad Gooch in his biography of O’Connor suggests that she was infatuated with him. It’s clear from their letters—there aren’t that many of them—that they had great affection for each other. But if she did indeed fall for him, she did not make these feelings public. Which left the door open for me to try to imagine what would have happened if people like those two actually had fallen in love with each other.
I think I also researched their relationship, in some way, by drawing on my repeated viewings of The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday. They don’t make erotically charged banter like that anymore—I have my theories about that, which are informed by Fast-Talking Dames, Maria DiBattista’s excellent book about screwball comedy—and I guess I wanted to see if I could fill the void.
How do your own feelings about religion inform the book?
Bernard’s feelings about religion are similar to my own. Although I was raised Evangelical, I converted to Catholicism, like Bernard, in my twenties in search of a faith that was my own, and, like Bernard, I set my faith aside because I was not sure who I was talking to when I talked to God. Unfortunately, I suppose I am also something of the disgruntled customer Frances disparages in a letter to Bernard. I think that Evangelical Christianity, like Monsanto, or Real Housewives, is one of those things William Carlos Williams was talking about when he wrote that “the pure products of America go crazy”.
Questions of faith and doubt still occupy me, and writing a novel seemed a good way to spend time with those questions. The book was an attempt to give voice to a doubt filled with yearning and a faith that could accommodate irreverence. I wished there had been more real-life O’Connors around when I needed them, showing me that just because the Gospels didn’t have Jesus on the record as making jokes didn’t mean I couldn’t make them, and I sympathized with Lowell, who discarded many faiths and loves in a mad search for a perfection he’d never find.
Your book could also be read as a love letter to New York. Can you describe how you set the time and place? Do you think the city was more romantic then?
My parents came of age in the Fifties and Sixties, so I feel like I’ve inherited an understanding of those decades through family albums and stories. I’ve read quite a bit of Fifties literary history, particularly about the Partisan Review crowd. I’m a bit of a Plath freak, so I drew on what I knew of the Fifties from biographies, her journals, and The Bell Jar. Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness were hovering in the background too. Of course, it helps that Mad Men is so impeccably researched; I occasionally used that as a yardstick. As Always, Julia, a book of Julia Child’s letters to her friend Avis DeVoto, many of which were written during the Fifties, was also helpful, particularly for its illumination of political attitudes and period diction.
Do you think it was a more romantic time, in general?
I think that life might have been more elegant at that time—e.g., people did not wear pink velour sweatpants to church—but I don’t think that it was necessarily more romantic. I could argue that Patti Smith’s Seventies New York was just as romantic: cheap rents, homemade glamour, a dark and dirty downtown overrun by art-damaged lovers. In the same way your parents’ lives before you were born can seem like glamorous mysteries that you will never penetrate, the New York that existed before your arrival will always seem remote and therefore romantic, no matter what the time period. And then the New York of your arrival will seem like a movie you are writing and directing in Cinemascope, and after enough time has gone by, that movie of your life will turn into a charming period piece for the kids who come after you who can’t believe you wore that dress to drink in that neighborhood. The city is always and everywhere larger than life. But, like a lot of people, I worry about what’s going to happen when only the very rich can afford living here, which I fear may come to pass sooner rather than later. Then New York might not be romantic anymore. Then it will be Dubai.
Would you say that Frances and Bernard is historical fiction?
I would say that the bottom line is that I had a story I wanted to tell about desire and faith, and I borrowed from history to tell it. I wanted to write in such a way that even if you were familiar with the lives of Lowell and O’Connor, at a certain point you might forget that they were the inspiration for these characters, and you’d be fixated instead on the events transpiring between two people named Frances and Bernard.
Are you a reader of historical fiction?
If the definition of the term could be stretched to include books about 19th-century pioneer girls, daughters of Civil War soldiers, and turn-of-the-century redheads mad for puffed sleeves, then I certainly read a great deal of it growing up. I have read a lot of history and biography, but not a lot of historical fiction. I tend to keep the facts on one side of the shelf and fiction on the other. But there were two books I remember loving as a girl that were based on historical figures: a novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine by E.L. Konigsburg called A Proud Taste of Scarlet and Miniver, and a novel called The Road to Damietta by Scott O’Dell, author of Island of the Blue Dolphins, about a young Italian woman in love with the man who would become Francis of Assisi. Although I haven’t read either of these books since the Eighties, it did occur to me while writing the novel that in some ways I was paying tribute to O’Dell’s little-known romance, which is told from the perspective of a passionate girl falling in love with a charismatic and religious man who could never be hers. Ahem. Of course, I also I have to acknowledge my debt to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, one of my favorite books, in which the Victorian poet-lovers at the center of her book bear resemblances to Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Samuel Coleridge, but are not faithful recreations. As previously mentioned, I am not a genius, so this is why you do not see in the book, as you do in Possession, wholly original poems in the mode of the period. It’s like Tolkien for 19th-century obsessives (and I am one).
Where else did you find inspiration?
My late grandmother, my father’s mother, an Irish and English girl from Philadelphia who wrote mountains of letters to my late grandfather when he was serving in the Navy during World War II. My parents have those letters stored in a German baby biscuit tin in their house in New Jersey (my grandfather was German), and though I have always known about them, I can’t bring myself to read them. I think my head would explode from the tenderness therein—as well as from finally glimpsing a part of her life that my sister and I had never been privy to growing up, because my grandmother, widowed a little too early, was an incredibly proud and private person. My grandmother never went to college, and didn’t even have a great love of reading, but if Frances values an impeccably cooked dish and an impeccably tailored dress, it has everything to do with her.