A CONVERSATION WITH CLYDE EDGERTON
Q: How did this novel get started?
A: In 1977 I was living in a house that had a soft spot in the
kitchen floor. I became curious and crawled under the
kitchen and discovered an open well under the soft spot.
The well was covered but there seemed to be some kind of
relationship between the soft spot and the open well. At
the time I was a college professor teaching education
courses, and during the Christmas break of 1977 I decided
to write a short story about someone falling down the well.
I finished it—my first complete short story—and showed it
to a friend in the English department where I was teaching.
On May 14, I saw Eudora Welty reading her story
“Why I Live at the P.O.” on public television. I knew and
loved the story but I’d never seen her nor heard her read.
The experience of hearing that story read by her made me
decide to start writing fiction seriously, and I did so the
next morning.
Q: Why did you decide to become a writer?
A: Many reasons for sure. I discovered Emerson in high
school and enjoyed reading his essays. There seemed to be
power in his words and perhaps I wanted some of that
power. But I didn’t consciously consider becoming a writer.
Later in college, I was struck by the writing of Ernest Hemingway;
then Mark Twain; then Stephen Crane, specifically
his story “The Open Boat.” I was amazed that such emotion
could be communicated by words on a page. After college,
I flew airplanes in the air force for several years and
then went back to college for a degree in education. Before
finishing that work, I began reading Eudora Welty and
Flannery O’Connor. Because I recognized aspects of my
family and my early life in their stories, I was inspired to
give writing fiction a shot. When I started writing seriously
I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing and
have felt that way since.
Q: How long did you work on this novel and why did you
tell it from multiple points of view?
A: The novel started with the short story of a boy falling
down a well that was under a kitchen floor. That was in
1977. The novel was finished in 1987 and published in
1988. I worked on the novel off and on during those ten or
eleven years, while writing short stories, essays, and a couple
of novels, Raney and Walking Across Egypt.
Originally the novel was from a third-person omniscient
point of view. The reader looked down on what was
happening in the story and ventured into the heads of different
characters. When I showed that version to my editor
and publisher, whose perspectives I valued, they kindly
suggested I show it to no one else and get to work on a
rewrite. The next draft, from the point of view of Mark, was
no more successful than the first. Next, I tried to write from
the point of view of a wisteria vine, and that also flopped. I
didn’t consider first-person point of view, because no one
person could cover the time span (more than 150 years) of
the novel. Then I had a student in a college class named
Bliss, and I liked that name so much I decided to invent a
character named Bliss for the novel. Because the novel was
about a family, I’d have her marry into the family. I decided
that she’d need to tell what the family was like. I realized
only then that the story needed that point of view. I was left
with one option: Let the different characters tell the story
from their own perspectives. I found pieces of the draft told
by the vine and started letting different characters as well
as the vine tell parts of the story and that plan worked.
Q: Where did the vine come from?
A: There’s a real wisteria vine near my family graveyard between
Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s been
there as long as I can remember. I decided that in order to
solve the “time” problem the novel was presenting—that
is, who could tell the parts of the story from before the lifetimes
of the people in the book?—I’d let the vine narrate.
Once I did that I decided to go ahead and let dead people
talk and that was a kind of breakthrough in getting the entire
story told.
Q: Are events in this novel based on actual events?
A: All the events are made-up, fictional. I served in the war
in Southeast Asia as a pilot and some of Mark’s experiences
couldn’t have been written had I not had that experience.
I also attend family graveyard cleanings, and those in the
book resemble those in my life. There are other characters
and events in the book that would never have been written
were it not for similar events I have either experienced or
observed or read about. All of the material about Zuba was
completely made-up, and the business of the floatplane
was based on one sighting of a pilot trying to fly a homebuilt
floatplane off a lake in North Carolina.
Q: Some readers might wonder what exactly happened at
the end of the novel. Why does it end as it does?
A: In the draft before the last draft, there was a final page to
the novel. That page was a short newspaper clipping dated
2088. It told about a scout troop finding of an old graveyard
overgrown with a wisteria vine. A sonogram (an X ray of
sorts) led to the discovery that “a young woman named
Meredith Copeland had been buried there in 1988” and
that her leg had been buried elsewhere in the graveyard for
an unknown reason. This date confirmed that Meredith
had not died in the floatplane on the flight that was described
on the last page of the novel. But that newspaper
clipping page was a tad over the top and I decided to remove
it and let the book end somewhat ambiguously, as
life ends. The type on that last page and the little design at
top demonstrates that Meredith is telling his story from the
grave. Did he fly? I think he did, just as he said he did, but
I would respect other opinions.
Q: What are several influences that led to the writing of
this novel?
A: A main influence was family stories. Many of the family
stories in the novel are very much like ones in my family.
I’d heard them over and over as I grew up, and many were
told at annual grave cleanings. I’d also heard funny stories
about an uncle Alfred who died before I was born. I imagine
that he was not unlike the Albert of the novel and it was
fun to make up a character who resembled someone in my
family who I’d heard many stories about but had never
met.
Also, I wanted to write about my experience in the war
in Southeast Asia, but had not been able to because I had
been too close to it emotionally.
In my childhood I took a trip every Christmas to
Florida and I wanted to fictionalize those trips in a book
and this book was a chance to do that. And also the book
gave me an opportunity to fictionalize some of my experiences
in a garage band back in the sixties.
Q: Do you consider this a “southern” novel and yourself a
“southern” writer?
A: In the sense of southern novel defined by Louis Rubin in
his introduction to A Gallery of Southerners and other
pieces, I’d say the novel is a southern novel, and I’m happy
to consider myself a southern writer, given that I live in the
South and most of my books are about characters who live
there and were socialized there. It’s also as true or perhaps
more true that I’m a maker of American literature—and
southern literature is a part of that, not separate from it,
as some southerners and non-southerners would like to
think.
Q: Where did the idea of the floatplane originate?
A: One summer day, after I’d finished several drafts of the
novel, but before the story had anything to do with a floatplane,
I was standing in the upper parking lot at Lake
Wheeler, a popular lake near my home. Down the hill
toward the lake, in a lower parking lot, I saw a parked
pickup truck with a boat trailer attached. On the trailer
rested something that looked like a small boat with long,
folded back wings. Up front, attached to the frame, were
two propellers. I could see somebody moving around in
the cab of the pickup. I walked down to take a closer look.
Yes, it was, by golly, some kind of aircraft.
One of the most dramatic features of the aircraft was
this: In the open cockpit, along with a flight stick up from
the floor, rudder pedals, a throttle to the left, and an airspeed
indicator on the tiny instrument panel, was the pilot’s
seat: a bolted-to-the-floor, yellow and green aluminum lawn
chair.
I walked to the open driver’s door of the pickup truck.
Inside was a small man with thin, wispy red hair. He wore
fishing waders and was pulling a blue football helmet onto
his head. Let me say that again: He was wearing fishing
waders and was pulling a blue football helmet onto his
head. I introduced myself, reached into the cab, and shook
his hand.
“Tom Purcell,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Are you going to try to fly that thing?”
“I sure am.”
Later I watched as he drove this airplane back and forth
across the lake trying to get it to fly. It never left the water.
At home that night, I made a lot of notes. I was a
treasure-hunting fiction writer who’d just found a sunken,
gold-laden ship.
After several attempts at short stories about a homemade
floatplane, I realized that the strange homebuilt craft
could fit into my novel-in-progress, then called Natural
Suspension. It would belong to the likable yet clumsy head
of the Copeland family household, Albert. So I wrote a
floatplane into my novel.
The sighting of the little homebuilt (Mr. Purcell remodeled
the aircraft I saw into one that actually flew) was
one of the best things that ever happened to me. It provided
vivid and significant fodder for a novel in need of
vivid and significant fodder. (The answer to this question is
a condensed version of part of a chapter in a nonfiction
book about flying airplanes that I’m now writing in the
spring of 2004.)
Q: There seem to be three stories at work in the novel:
1) the family history story, 2) the boyhood story, and 3) the
war story. Were you tempted to make three novels? Why
didn’t you?
A: I was tempted to make three novels and had enough
material, but a small voice kept saying that I should make
it all into one novel. Deciding on multiple points of view
helped me see how it could be done, and then while I was
floundering about, trying to figure out how to jell the three
stories into one, the idea of the floatplane came along, and
the floatplane notebooks kept by Albert Copeland was a
thread that held the three separate stories—or thematic
entities—together.
Q: Where do you get names for your characters?
A: Albert was named for my Uncle Alfred, as I said, and I
even called him Alfred in early drafts. And you know how
Bliss came about. Meredith came from hearing Burgess
Meredith read from The Rievers on television. I can’t remember
where Thatcher came from, but back in those
days I’d comb obituaries for first and last names and then
tack together my favorites. I think Copeland came that
way. More recently I’m more apt to just open the phone
book and start my treasure hunt.
Q: Please provide a little insight into your family, family reunions,
grave cleanings, and how being raised in the South
has affected your writing?
A: I’ve attended a grave cleaning most years of my life—at
a small rural family graveyard—and have heard many
family stories there. I also attend regular family reunions
on both sides of my family. These gatherings used to give
me a sense of permanence and history, but time has passed,
and I now get a sense of history and impermanence as I see
the older people pass away and I become one of the older
ones myself. This changing view is not necessarily bad, it’s
more realistic and gives a sense of preciousness to the time
we have with those we know best, for better or worse.
I was raised among people who farmed for a living and
thus my younger years were spent hearing about things
and places and animals and fields and plants, rather than
about political and world history, ideas, and theories. I
think this socialization increased chances for me writing in
ways that help a reader to “see.”
Neither of the above—family reunions or farming—
are confined to the South of course. But in the past, there
were probably higher incidents of both than in other parts
of the United States.
Q: What would you say to someone who claimed this
novel was racist?
A: In order to write fiction about a people from a place,
you must tell the truth about how they would behave and
talk. To do otherwise would be to lie—especially if you
leave out those things that make them look bad. Racism
was (and is) a horrible cultural reality in the South (as well
as in the rest of America) and around the world. To pretend
it doesn’t exist will do nothing to make it better and
may well make it worse. The word nigger is as ugly a word
as can be found in the English language because of arrogant
hatred that has often been in the hearts of those using
it. And when you love people who use that word regularly,
and have used it regularly yourself, you run into a kind of
problem that can be confronted in fiction—you get into
places where uncertainty can only be embraced, into places
art needs to be, into places where we all come and go.
I grew up in a community that was centered on Bethesda
Baptist Church, and that is where I received my first
moral instructions. One of the best things about that
church were the older people, many of whom I felt close
to in the same way I felt close to my twenty-three aunts and
uncles. These older church people loved me and offered
safety and security. I was lucky to have that experience.
Every year on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, my
mother’s side of the family met at a family graveyard and
cleaned it. Some of these people I saw (and still see) only
once a year, but we are held together by family stories like
other families, not just in the South but around the world.
Only after I was grown did I realize that family stories and
relationships can be used as tools to make up stories about
made-up people—stories that, though they are made-up,
actually are about truths, about how we feel about and
treat each other, old truths that help us see ourselves in
new lights and with new insights.
In my family (not unusual in agrarian families raised
before the time of television) the human voice—in telling
stories—was a major tool of entertainment, or it had been
in generations before mine, clearly, and my aunts and uncles
and parents unconsciously brought that aspect of their
heritage home to me. That stories, and funny original
phrases, and what who said to whom, were at the center of
my family’s life was a great gift to me. I soaked up a lot of
what was said as well as how it was said and used it in the
stories I’ve made up in my life.
Q: Do you have a favorite among your own novels?
A: I like all my books, but if I were in a boat and had to
throw away all but one, I’d keep The Floatplane Notebooks.
In my view, it’s the most complex of my books and somehow
is closer to my heart.