The New Yorker Radio Hour - Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Love, and Politics

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Jack,” is the fourth to be set among the world and people of a fictional town called Gilead, Iowa. The novelist grew up in Idaho, and, when she moved to the flatter country of Iowa, she “noticed that the landscape had a very high number of little colleges scattered over it,” she tells David Remnick, that were sometimes the oldest buildings in a town. “I wanted to know who had built these things, that this was how you would settle an empty landscape. And that was when I came across the abolitionist movement. Those were the people who did this.” From that history and culture, Robinson imagined Gilead and the old preacher named John Ames who narrates the first book in her series. “Jack” concerns the son of Ames’s closest friend, who was disgraced and left Gilead. The book finds Jack, who is white, in St. Louis and in a predicament: he is in love with a Black woman, at a time when an interracial relationship was a scandal and, in some places, a crime. Plus, the début novelist Douglas Stuart. After two decades of working in the fashion industry and dreaming about writing, Stuart recently published an acclaimed first novel, “Shuggie Bain.” He showed us around his old stomping grounds in New York’s garment district. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Marilynne Robinson is one of the most admired fiction writers in America. In particular, she's known for her depiction of Midwestern life and more unusual, spiritual life. Robinson grew up in Idaho, but long ago relocated to Iowa, and the landscape there, the history there, made quite an impression on her and her imagination. When I went to Iowa, where I went because of the writers program there, I noticed that the landscape had a very high number of little colleges scattered over it, and big colleges and significant colleges, you know.

Often the oldest structures in any community is the college, which is a very extraordinary thing. Places like Grinnell, you know. And so I wanted to know who had built these things, that this was how you would settle and empty landscape. And that was when I came across the abolitionist movement. Those were the people who did this. And they felt, as people often say, that knowledge is power, that knowledge is freedom,

that, you know, in order to create a culture in which slavery could not be introduced or could not flourish, one major antidote would be education. As she thought about that history, Robinson imagined and brought to life an Iowa town called Gilead. That became the title of her 2004 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Gilead is narrated by an aging preacher named John Ames, and at the heart of the book is a profound question, how should Christians respond to our country's legacy of racial oppression?

More books set in the world of Gilead followed. Home, Lila, and now a fourth book called Jack. Jack is Jack Bouten, the son of John Ames' closest friend. One of the reasons that I have written the books that followed Gilead is because, you know, I have to focus when I write a novel, and I really do, I realize that. But there are all these peripheral characters, you know. They are strong presences in my imagination.

that have seemed to me one after another to deserve his or her own novel. Jack was especially present to my mind. I mean, he's, I think, my most recurring character even before the book. And he's a scoundrel. He's a prodigal son who's always getting into trouble. Were you setting out to redeem him in some way in this novel? Well, you know, I have always felt that there is a fundamental innocence in Jack. that he, the world is, is, from our perspective, strange to him in a way that he continuously tests.

And one of the things that he does is sort of test himself against his father's anxieties and hopes and nurturing and all the rest of it, you know. he's as I see him alienated from from experience itself really he's a recurring character but this novel is set in St. Louis not not in Iowa and it's a it's a love story jack falls in love with a black woman named della miles and there's this wonderful extended scene in the book where they come across each other accidentally in a in a cemetery it's early in their courtship they hardly know each other could you read a passage from that scene? Yes. There she was in the cemetery of all places,

and at night and ready to be a little glad to see him. I am the Prince of Darkness. He couldn't say that. It was a joke he made to himself. He would walk down to where she was in the lamplight. No. Any policeman who came might take it into his head to say the word solicitation.

since he was disreputable and she was black since they were together at night in the cemetery better to keep his distance and he knew he always looked better from a distance even a little gentlemanly he had his jacket on his tie was in his pocket he said you really shouldn't be here

a ridiculous thing to say since there she was then as if by way of explanation there are some pretty strange people here at night when there he was among the tombstones himself taking a little comfort from the fact that she could not see him well to notice the difference between whatever she thought of him in her moment of apparent relief

and how he actually was. Now this is just a little bit of a scene that really extends over the first quarter of the book. Does something like that come to you fully born in the imagination? How does it arrive and then how has it worked? Well, you know, I knew that Jack was going to be in St. Louis. And so a friend of mine and I went to St. Louis to sort of get the lay of the land. And there's a spectacular old cemetery there, Bellefontaine.

And we walked around and it didn't. It was just mortuary Disneyland or something. I mean, these just villages of tombs and forests of, now I'm forgetting my own word, obelisks and so on, you know, and beautiful trees, spectacular, old, overgrown trees, and a lake or a very large pond. And it was having been there that made me feel that I could make good use of that cemetery. This story takes place in Missouri in the 50s.

When anti-misagination laws still very much existed, we're obviously in the middle of a reckoning on a race in this country, and one could say it's a reckoning that's a very, very long time in coming, and we don't know exactly where it's going. But do you write with a political purpose when you're writing fiction? I think it would depend on the definition of political, you know. I mean, when you look at Moby Dick, for example, there's a lyrical exultation of the figure of the sailor who, in fact, would have been a despised figure in the time that Melville wrote, you know?

And, you know, I suppose some people would call that political, but I think if it's your politics, you would say, no, that's not political, you know, that's visionary. and true, you know. I'm sure you've noticed and appreciated that many of your readers, who are themselves secular, find that your books, which are so deeply attached to and concerned with faith and Christianity, these books really resonate with them. Have you thought about why that is? Well, I think for one thing, you know, that, that, that, that, you know, that, there is a sort of, you know, there is religion itself, you know, the idea that the very,

you know, apparently universal idea among people, you know, a hundred years ago at any rate, that, you know, that there's a sacredness in being, that the origins of being are themselves divine, that human beings have an extraordinary position among created things, you know, that what they do and what they suffer, those things are very meaningful, you know. I think, I mean, at one point, I don't think it's terribly difficult to read very, to write very much within the traditions of Orthodox Christianity at the same time that you are writing non-exclusively in a way that could be acknowledged by non-Christian faith, you know?

Five years ago, you wrote an essay called Fear, which is about Christianity in America today, and you talked about Christianity, particularly in this country, as more and more becoming associated with ignorance, intolerance and belligerent nationalism. And what are your concerns about that? Well, I think that anyone really, I'm not anyone, what can I say? We have, there are legitimate grounds for concern

about whether or not the actual burden of Christian thought is being perpetuated whether it is being consulted even, you know. It really, I think part of the reason that we're in such trouble is because, you know, Tocqueville said that we were great because we were religious basically, you know. And when the religion goes bad, you know, when the salt has really lost it safer,

then you think, then we are really in. trouble. This is a conversation that you had with, among other people, with Barack Obama, not long after the publication of that essay, which was published in the New York Review of Books. Now, one thing that Obama has said about you and your writing is that he feels that you share a certain sense of hopefulness about this country, about American values. I have to ask, are you reading the same newspapers that I am because this is a rough time? I don't mean to be flip about it. No, no.

It has to be said, you know. You know, there are elements in this country who seem to be very highly motivated, who are clearly, who seem to have a very highly articulated notion of what is to be desired, who are completely cryptic from my point of view. I mean, there's energy behind a kind of change that systematically demolishes democratic conventions. And, you know, and toward what goal? Toward what is their horizon, you know? I think if this were by any means a normal political movement, we would know what they want.

we would I mean what do you do after you've basically you know destroyed the credibility of the CDC you know what do you do when you have depopulated major government agencies

and fill them with people that you know that have no qualifications and no obvious good sense you know I mean it's it's as if they had taken mannequins into the government

and replace the people that had been there previously, you know. And, you know, whose benefit? Where is this going? Marilynne Robinson, thank you so much. Thank you. Marilynne Robinson. Her new novel is called Jack. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Reck. Earlier this year, a writer named Douglas Stewart made his fiction debut with a story in the New Yorker,

and soon after he published a novel called Shuggy Bain. The book draws on Stewart's early life in a Glasgow housing project. While he was still a child, a very fidgety kid at his mother's knee, Douglas Stewart learned how to knit. And as an adult, he ended up in fashion, designing knitwear for Calvin Klein and other brands. He spent two decades working in the industry before the publication of this novel. And right after it came out, this was back in March, Stuart took us to his old stomping grounds. We're in the garment district of New York.

At the moment we are on 36th Street and we are actually going to head to one of the last manufacturing factories that still remains in the garment district. I was 24 when I first came to New York. My very first job was at Calvin Klein and I've worked in design now for 20 years and you come to learn where all the best vendors are and all the best salesmen are just by sort of experience and by word of mouth and people passing on contacts. The amazing thing about the garment district for me is the density of it and just how every sort of inch of space is used and as we walk along the street you'll see we pass button stores or places that just sell lace trimmings but the real magic and the real beauty of the garment district

actually happens several floors up there is actual manufacturing still in the garment district and it's one of the few neighborhoods in New York that still makes anything and I think that's why it appeals to me especially being a sort of working class boy from Glasgow and coming from a city that is known for what it manufactures, I have a huge affinity with the garment district. Knit illustrated?

Third? This was the very first workroom that the design studio at Calvin introduced me to. And so when I was producing samples or prototypes for the fashion shows, we would come along here and Peter would make them for us. We're looking for Peter, please. Peter, hi. It's been too long. It's been far too long.

The wonder of Knit Illustrated is the fact that you can really come, and in an afternoon, you can see what is your initial concept, come to life as a 3D garment. So I think the funny thing about knitting is most people in their minds eye have it as two sort of needles going clack, clack, and you make something while it's in your lap. But the machine that we're looking at just now is a Japanese machine. it's two meters long

with probably about 200 really tiny knitting needles with a mechanized carriage that is powered by a computer going left and right and left and right and before you sort of know it you will have a garment that emerges from this machine at the bottom as we turn our backs to the state-of-the-art Japanese machines

we're sort of faced with the machines that I remember actually from my boyhood and from studying textiles back in Scotland They're these sort of very heavy, very clunky, very low-tech knitting machines. It looks a little bit like an electric keyboard only with needles instead of keys. When you are finished making your prototypes or knitting your samples, you would bring them over to the large steam bed, and you would take the iron and then steam the sample to relax it

and see what the finished garment would look like. It's a right of passage to burn yourself on one of these. I think there's no fashion student that hasn't taken the skin off their thumb at one time or another. When my high school teacher sort of asked me what I wanted to do after school, I had said, you know, I would really love to go and study English. The teacher gave me the feedback and said, you know, that's not really something that boys from around here do. And so seeing that I was a kid that was certainly very creative and really good with my hands, I was sort of urged along into textiles, which is an incredibly Scottish thing to go into

because what does Scotland produce, if not whiskey, but cloth. And so I sort of took that and sort of channeled my life's work into tech sales. That alarm we hear is telling you that the knitting is ready. Working in fashion is more than a full-time job. I started to write Shuggy Bain 10, 12 years ago now, and I worked on it for 10 years, mostly because I had to fit my writing in around the margins of my life. I wrote only for myself and I kept it in private.

but I didn't really show anyone for many years, and the only person I showed my writing to was my husband. I've had two very different lives, being a working-class kid from the housing schemes of Glasgow, then suddenly being this fashion designer that travelled the world for inspiration and worked for all these huge American brands. And part of it was a little bit about sort of mourning

who I used to be in the world I came from because I didn't recognize myself in it anymore. I didn't quite feel like a complete person, and then also having this sort of design and this dream to write be unanswered. But the wonderful thing about writing or the wonderful thing about inventing worlds or bringing the world you once knew with you is they can live within you as long as they need to. Getting them out can wait. I've had to take the sort of long road in life and certainly fashion and textiles have given me a wonderful career and they've shown me the world,

but the passion at the heart of it was always about my writing. And I'm so grateful to be able to come full circle back to what it was I wanted to do when I was a young boy. Thank you, Peter. You're going to send me some book, right? Douglas Stewart. His novel is called Shuggy Bain, and you can read some of his stories at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today.

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