|
|
|
|
Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
Kennedy: Not at all. Most readers would probably not even notice. I hardly did myself. It interests me, though, that old Yahweh--Godot rather--is impotent. The character is sexually impotent. This functions, I think, on a number of levels, but it also makes me think of your take on women, and particularly with regard to The Book of Mamie. It is at once wonderfully funny and mythical, and Mamie seems a kind of spirit of American woman in all her innocence, toughness, hunger and force, even slyness and, beneath it all, cleverness, love, generosity--maybe even a spirit of America in general, though this time as a woman.
It fascinates me how the once two-dimensional view of women has been displaced. It really does seem to be a paradigm shift and it has emerged, not only through the conscious effort of intelligent women and men, but even through a subconscious or archetypal surfacing of a force to rectify an imbalance in our structures. Joyce, of course, was writing about this too in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but in truth, how many people actually read those books? Your character of Mamie seems to me a part of this--she is an American giant. I understand that Mamie was modeled on a real person, but your choice of her as your main character--did it have to do with the sort of thing we are talking about?
Brenna: No, I simply chose Mamie because I was told a story about the actual Mamie Beaver of Golden Valley, Minnesota and I became fascinated with her power and her spirit, the joie de vivre of someone who had lived such a hellish childhood. In writing about her, I made surprising discoveries. That she was a savant, for instance. The world´s greatest mimic, greatest actress, and that she was magical, a spiritual Earth Mother. I had none of that in mind when I started writing her story.
Kennedy: I find this in my own writing, too, where men are suddenly making surprising discoveries about women. This grew further over the past couple of years in the form of stories that came to me almost as dreams--in one case, literally as a dream, in which a woman with no face held up a tablet before me on which were written some words. I awoke, scribbled them down, saw them in the morning, and they seemed to be words in a foreign language. They were, in fact, a mixture of French and Italian, and so I emailed them to a woman I know in Rome. She immediately emailed back that the words--donna della aube--meant quite clearly "Mistress of the Sunrise." Around the same time I had that dream, I experienced an optical illusion by which I thought I saw in the window across the way from my apartment an illuminated statue of the Blessed Mother, with her arms opened out in embrace--it was only a lamp whose shape resembled that form, but my eyes, or my mind, read it that way. At a writer´s conference where I was teaching, a group of women organized a goddess circle to go out on the countryside and welcome the full moon; to my surprise, they invited me to join them. I was the only man invited. A story came out of that, "Rafferty the Goddess." I know that I am by no means finished with this--or rather it is by no means finished with me.
Frank: Tom, trying to be as objective as possible, do experiences like these reinforce your belief in the spiritual, or do they reflect themes and issues that occupy or haunt your imagination? In other words, do dreams bring you closer to Truth or only to your personal version of truth?
Kennedy: Let me answer that this way. I am old enough to remember a time when women were generally not regarded in contemporary society as serious beings. Men laughed at them, mocked them--women couldn´t think, women couldn´t drive, ´Hey look! Girls! Let´s snowball ´em!´, etc. Women were literally enslaved, and as with all enslaved groups, they were assumed to be inferior by those who enslaved them. They were beaten and terrorized in other ways and denied the right of equal education. For Christ´s sake women were not even allowed to vote! And even today many women continue to be paid less money for the same jobs that men do. It took me many years to understand that this very obvious situation was a fact. Most societies had enslaved half of the life force and confined sexuality as something shameful or worthy to be practiced or purchased in the dark. A whole generation of American men knew everything about the mechanics of the internal combustion engine and was ignorant of the existence of the clitoris (that´s a quote from Steinbeck´s Travels with Charley). Until the mid-twentieth century, the Christian tradition did not even have one single goddess--then finally Mary was given special status, but she was and remains a sexless goddess. Compare her with the Celtic hag goddess Sheela na Gig, holding open her vulva with a tilted smile. Or with Kali or Rangda devouring the earth. Or Diana the huntress. In the past decades startling changes have taken place, and it is now possible for a man to overcome the handicaps of the past and begin to see a woman´s full and wonderful humanity, the true sacredness of her sexuality, her power, and to begin to become more of a human being himself as a result. Yes these things haunt this writer´s imagination, and yes they reinforce my belief and trust in the spiritual. I am eager to try to explore this in my fiction to see what I can learn and discover. When Duff and I were in Dublin this past June to celebrate Bloomsday, we sat up drinking vodka (www.AbsolutVodka.com) and talking about women one night, and Duff suddenly looked at me with surprise and exclaimed, "You actually adore women, don´t you?!" Guilty as charged! And what better accusation to suffer than during a celebration of the greatest woman adorer of the 20th century, Leopold Bloom!
Brenna: I have to admit that I´m more ambivalent about women than Tom, but I´m also very ambivalent about men. It balances out. I´m not picking on anybody. But Tom´s adoration of women caught me by surprise because I´ve never felt that way about them. You talked about Mamie as embodying a kind of adoration of American women, and I answered, "Yes, at their best." Thinking of Mamie as solid and foundational, Earth-Mother if you will, helped me keep her in focus. I thought at one time that maybe I was being too obvious with her; but then one day I got a letter from a woman agent in San Francisco to whom I had sent the manuscript, and she said that for her to represent me, I would have to get rid of all the anti-feminist symbolism in my book. She didn´t go into specifics. I was flabbergasted at first. But then I told her to send my manuscript back pronto. I always have to keep in mind what Blake said, "Every eye sees differently." What makes it so difficult to communicate clearly with one another is just that, the mind interpreting according to what´s been stuffed into it. I do it, you do it, we all do it, but that agent was carrying too much feminist baggage and it was overloading her judgment, making her see her peculiar biases rather than what was really there.
As to Mamie´s model, she was a woman who lived in Minnesota, a friend of my mother and my aunt and her real name was Mamie Beaver. She lost her parents at an early age, and she became a ward of the town, and they taught her to run the movie projector at the theater. She actually did fall in love with it, kiss it, hug it and get graphite on her fingers and face. She called the projector Powers, which was the brand name printed on the side, and would say to my mother, "It´s that Powers, he loves me so." From that anecdote told to me years ago, I wrote a short story and it just kept going, until it became a novel. It was the mystery of a girl falling in love with a movie projector that propelled the writing. I wanted to find out why she fell in love with this mechanical thing that couldn´t really love her in return. I guess much of the book was an attempt to find an answer.
Frank: Which you obviously did.
Brenna: Yes, it was something to do with what I just said about communication, how difficult it is to truly reach one another, to sweep life´s baggage aside and get down to the heart of things. You might have noticed in the book how difficult it is for anyone to "teach" Mamie, or even to have a conversation with her. But not for Powers, not for the machine, which opens up the world to her, shows her things she never dreamed existed. Powers has the power to teach her. He is able to bring out her hidden gifts, her perfect pitch for voices, her ability to mimic anyone she sees on the screen, her acting talents. No wonder she loves him so. Actually, what happened to Mamie is happening all over this country right now. The computers, TVs, video games, the movies, and we learn much more from them now than we learn from anything else. This can be bad or good of course, depending on what´s inside the machine. In Mamie´s case it was a good thing at first, but ultimately it had tragic consequences. That´s the story of knowledge, a mixed bag.
|
