Writers Talking Writers: Lois Lowry and Helen Phillips

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with two authors whose work explores how future generations will cope with the world they’ve inherited. Helen Phillips (Hum, The Need) discusses the experimental permission passed down by Italo Calvino, and Lois Lowry (The Giver, Number the Stars) delves into the biographical import of Flannery O’Connor.

Lois Lowry on Flannery O’Connor

What about O’Connor’s work appealed to you?

In the past, circles of literary criticism—particularly what they used to call the “New Criticism” out of the University of Chicago—told us we must view literary work in itself without any reference to its author. That's sort of fallen into disfavor, and I think the thing that originally attracted me to Flannery O'Connor is her life and its influence on her work. She died when she was 39 and left a body of work, and I didn't write my first published book until I was forty. So there was a whole period of time when I was being a housewife stirring the spaghetti and tending the children when she was turning out remarkable work, which has stayed with people, not just me.

And she always left me, and probably all readers, with questions. In every story, she presented these encounters with profound evil in combat with virtue. But you come away from the story uncertain which is which, even though at first glance—or at first reading, for me, when I was 18 years old—it seemed clear that the guy who murders everybody in the family is the evil. You come away, after reading it many years later, thinking about it a lot more.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the first of her stories that comes to mind for many people. Do you feel that way?

No, not necessarily. It’s interesting, because I encountered at a later point—not in college or graduate school—her very first published story, which was described as an immature work, and yet I kind of like it almost the best of all of hers. It was called The Geranium, and it’s a story of displacement. It's about an elderly man who, for whatever reasons, has to go live with his daughter in the city, and he's been a rural guy and so there's that feeling of displacement.

The plot is not as complex as her later stories, but what's wonderful about it, particularly given the fact that it was her first published work and she was very young—she was a student at Iowa when she wrote that story—was that she already had mastered that voice. There she is, living in Iowa and not yet ill, before she goes back to Georgia because of her illness, then she's displaced and she's the outlier. So all these things happen to her which had already happened in many of her stories.

You mentioned before that some believe an artist’s biography shouldn’t impact the reading of a work, but it’s hard not to see the impact of her illness in the darkness of her later stories.

I think it did a great deal. Several of the stories relate to her illness. One that I love is called “Good Country People.” It’s one of the ones that has a person with a physical defect. Also, incidentally, she was a master of choosing the names of her characters. Sometimes that can come across as trite and obvious, but I don't think it does in her work. In that particular story the girl is named Joy Hopewell, and I love the man's name: Manly Pointer. He’s the outlier, as happens so often in her stories, who appears from another place, and is not part of the existing condition until he enters it. So here's this girl, Joy Hopewell, who—and this, I think, is relevant to Flannery O'Connor's biography—has a PhD, but for a number of reasons, one of which is that she only has one leg, she has returned to live with her mother. Poor Flannery O'Connor had to go back to live with her mother, too, and they were very different.

In the story, Joy Hopewell is very contemptuous of her mother, and her mother has no respect for the educational honors that her daughter has received, so they're caught in this bad relationship. And then Joy Hopewell changes her name—as Flannery O'Connor did—to the ugliest name she can think of, Hulga—Hulga!—which drives her mother crazy. You can see this tension between two people forced together by circumstances, as Flannery O'Connor and her mother were, resentful but having to make it work.

We'd like to think of Hulga as the good person, especially once Pointer, the evil man, appears. (Even though she was deeply religious, you know that Flannery O'Connor is going to use a Bible salesman as representing something hypocritical and bad, and indeed, that's what he turns out to be.) But Hulga decides to seduce him and takes him into a barn loft and is very contemptuous of him, of course, because she has a PhD, and he's a 19-year-old, uneducated Bible salesman. She's very proud of being able to climb the ladder into the loft despite her artificial leg, only to find that, during her attempted seduction, he steals her leg. He opens his suitcase—which does not contain Bibles but pornographic playing cards—puts her leg in there, and leaves her diminished and humiliated in the loft. If that’s a story of evil and virtue in conflict, which is which? It raises such interesting questions.

Earlier, we were talking about A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The Misfit, a serial murderer, finds himself with this family and kills all of them. In the midst of this slaughter, the grandmother, who is probably the most important figure in the story besides the Misfit himself—so again, we’ve got good, in the grandma, and evil, in the Misfit—says suddenly, before she is murdered, “You're one of my babies. You're one of my own children.” Again, you end up with that odd sensation that she’s turned the tables on you. Her stories are purported to be about redemption, but who's being redeemed?

Helen Phillips on Italo Calvino

Several authors have mentioned Calvino as an inspiration over the course of these interviews. Why do you think he’s had such a profound impact?

Maybe it's best to answer that question from a personal angle. I first read Calvino in my early twenties—it was Invisible Cities—and that gave me permission to think about what a book could be in new ways. That ant his other book that did that—If On a Winter's Night a Traveler—are the most significant for me. Both of those books are really questioning what a narrative can even be. For a young writer, that was so liberating. A narrative doesn't have to go beginning to end. A narrative might be interrupted. A narrative might unfold in fragments. A narrative might occur as a sort of strange accumulation over time. So I think of Calvino as having written these permission books—they give you permission to experiment with what structure can be.

Karl Ove Knausgård said something similar. That there was before reading Calvino, and after.

And what's interesting about that is that Calvino seems to have gone on the same journey, because his early writing was much more traditional in form, and when I've read some of his earliest stuff, it's not very exciting to me. But he too went through a revolution in himself of saying, Okay, I can take this premise to an absurd length. He once wrote: “I began doing what came most naturally to me—that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.”

On a page level, what do you think writers can learn from Calvino?

It is tricky, in a sense, because his books are translated and I can't read them in Italian. I do feel that if you were to read any writer in translation, Calvino is the one, because his books themselves are so interested and delighted in the theme of translation. In Invisible Cities, the premise, the bookend device, is that Marco Polo is telling Kublai Khan about the different cities that he's seen in his travels. That does have a basis in history: Marco Polo knew Khan, and at one point, Calvino describes how, because they don't share a language, Marco Polo is actually acting out a lot of these stories that he's telling. So if you had to read someone in translation, Calvino is the one to read. I think he'd be delighted that a text can have different permutations depending on the translation.

But what could writers learn from Calvino? I mean there's definitely a lesson structurally in terms of what we can get from a narrative. I often teach Calvino, and the question I always bring up with my students is, if we are not getting narrative in the traditional sense, what are we getting instead? We tend to value traditional narratives a lot, but there's a lot that you can get when you don't have a traditional narrative.

For me, one thing Calvino gives is haunting and strange and beautiful images, which are almost more like poetry. There are philosophical ideas and questions. I also find in him a lot of extended metaphors that feel very applicable to my own life, so the books feel wise or helpful to me in a personal way. Like there's one in Invisible Cities in a story called “Octavia,” about a city that's suspended on spider webs over an abyss—Spiderweb City—and then the last line is, “Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long.” You'd think that in Spiderweb City they would be rife with anxiety, but, in fact, they're more in touch with the fact of the abyss. And sometimes, when I get all caught up in my life I try to remind myself, You know we're all just hanging over an abyss, and I take a weird kind of perverse comfort in that.

These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.