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By the Book
Marilynne Robinson: By the Book
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The author of “Gilead” and “When I Was a Child I Read Books” says that after “Housekeeping,” her greatest fear was writing “a fraudulent book simply to escape the embarrassments of having written only one novel.”
When and where do you like to read?
I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention. I read whenever I can, when I am not preparing to teach, or writing.
What is your favorite book (or story) in the Bible, and why?
The Bible is a very great literature, profoundly self-referential. My favorite book or story tends to be the one I’ve read or thought about most recently. For the moment, that is the Gospel of John and the Gospels generally. But the Old Testament is full of splendid things, too. Joseph and his brothers, David and Absalom — narratives that are as fine as any to be found anywhere.
Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
I do reread. I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.
What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I’m attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity. Every period is trapped in its own assumptions, ours, too, so I am always trying, without much optimism, to put together a sort of composite of the record we have made that gives a larger sense of the constant at work in it all, that is, ourselves. The project is doomed from the outset, I know. Still.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
If you are surprised by arcana, the list would be very long. I should mention that Lombard’s “Sentences” is now in English translation.
What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?
I remember reading books that overpowered me, when I was still young enough to be an ideal reader. Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” Garland’s “Main-Travelled Roads.” These are books I have never reread because I am afraid I would dispel the fascination they had for me, a state of mind I hope to recover when I suspend my own disbelief and write fiction. Poe and Dickens were important to me, and before them “The Yearling” and “The Secret Garden.”
What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?
Reference books in the dining room, older books needing and deserving protection in bookcases in the living room, theology and philosophy on shelves in the bedroom, classical and ancient Near Eastern literature in the study, modern history and Americana in the room that has only bookshelves in it, unclassifiable books in stacks on the stairs.
During the long years between “Housekeeping” and “Gilead,” did you ever despair of being an author of more than one novel?
My greatest fear was that I would write a fraudulent book simply to escape the embarrassments of having written only one novel. If there is nothing fictional on my mind I do best to concern myself with other things. I wrote a fair amount of nonfiction during those years, and was absorbed by that work. Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
In “Home,” you quickly revisited the characters from “Gilead.” Do you foresee ever returning to Ruth and Sylvie and the rest of the “Housekeeping” crew?
I actually waited for Ruth and Sylvie to stop haunting my imagination. Finally they did stop. After “Gilead” I realized I was being haunted again, and I decided to let these souls have more life, since they seemed to want it. If there was a time when I could have done the same for Ruth and Sylvie, that time passed.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them are frustrated by the thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language, of ordinary contact even with the people they know best and love best. They turn to writing for this reason. I think many of them are magnanimous in a degree their lives cannot otherwise express. To meet Emily Dickinson or Henry James would be, from their side, to intrude on them, maybe even to make them feel inadequate to expectation. I can’t imagine being a sufficient reason for the disruption. We do have their books. That said, I would like to meet William James.
If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?
What do you plan to read next?
“The Cotton Kingdom,” by Frederick Law Olmsted.
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