The Times’ obit for Russell Banks ended with the envoi from his novel, Continental Drift (1985). Banks had allowed his fiction about afflicted underdogs wouldn’t “set people like them free” and “changes nothing in the world.” Yet he still insisted attentiveness to facts of their imagined lives (or deaths) isn’t frivolous:
Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives — no, especially wholly invented lives — deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
That final phrase echoes — and subverts — the severe opening lines of V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
I’m pretty sure Banks meant to talk back to Naipaul, though I wouldn’t want to amp up their differences. They were both clear-eyed about how low humans will go to avoid being “men who are nothing.” That clarity enabled Naipaul, once he’d been in the Ummah, to see what was coming America’s way long before 9/11. And Banks had the prophetic gene too as he proved in his contribution to First’s pre-election roundtable in 2020.
Joe Biden may well win the election on November 3rd, but my great fear is that Trump will refuse to lose…Regardless of the results of the election, Trump will remain president until January 20, 2021.
He zeroed in on the prospects for a “Thermidorian reaction to the Obama years and to the social and cultural changes of recent decades in matters of sexuality, race, law enforcement, and technology…”
In recent weeks I’ve been re-reading Faulkner. His work terrifies me even as it clarifies what we’re up against, which is to say, who we really are. His novels are set in the 1920s and -30s, but that’s not ancient history. It’s my parents’ generation. It’s my history. Faulkner’s White characters are vicious racists, white supremacists to the bone, violent and armed, poor and ill-educated, reverent celebrants of the Lost Cause, bitter and terrified and childishly insecure. Not unlike my parents and my uncles and aunts — New Englanders, yes, but poor White American working people who had been poor White working people for ten generations. Faulkner saw them clearly, and yet he loved them. He saw that their hearts had been eaten by demons, the demons of history. This is a time to be afraid, my friends, a time to be very afraid. A storm the likes of which we have not seen in our long history is fast approaching.
Banks’ knack for reading American rooms didn’t him turn into a doom-monger. And his instinct for happiness took him where neither Naipaul nor Faulkner could go. I’m flashing on a trip in Banks’ The Book of Jamaica. The narrator of the Book is a white American writer who unmasks himself as he digs into the history of Jamaica’s Maroons—descendants of Ashanti warriors who freed themselves from Spanish slavers and later forced Brits to grant them autonomy in mountainous precincts of the island. Banks’ traveler (and alter-ego?) moves from the first person to the second—“you are becoming your own stranger”—as Jamaica gets under his skin. When he and a Rasta mentor happen on a vital community of Maroons whose dailiness is informed by an imagined Africa, that meeting leads to one more personal/political change. The narrator becomes “Johnny”—the name traditionally given to a trusted white man by Maroons. Awed by his new soulmates, Johnny agrees to drive them to a conclave with another clan of Maroons across the island. The Book of Jamaica peaks with that van ride. Its account of this jaunt across J.A. isn’t above magical realist flights of feeling. Banks dared to wing it in that van (a couple years before E.T.).
When Johnny’s crew lands and pulls over for fish and peppers cooked on outside stoves, this re-reader is always hungry for more. The juke in the bar next to the fish stands is smoking too, “with forty or fifty of the newest songs on it, the sign of critical and demanding and political neighborhood.” Johnny and the Rasta start to step to heavy beats, prepping for an elder Maroon who will light up the joint:
Gordo…after starting slowly has begun to dance faster and faster, in perfect time, with increasing grace and lightfootedness, a tiny old man who soon seems to have left the ground to dance a few inches above it, whirling like a dervish in the crowded room, forcing everyone to clear a space for him in the middle. His unbuttoned black suit coat flares out around him like a skirt as he spins and dips, leaps up and drops through his own circle to the bare ground, while the music pounds along behind, his only perfect partner. The women and children leave the fish stand and come to stand at the open front of the bar to watch the old man and everyone in the bar…stares happily at Gordo, for the brittle, nervous, tiny man with the chirping voice has become liquid and weightless, has turned his old body wholly into music.
How did Banks find his way into that dance? (Neither Naipaul nor Faulkner…) There was no map passed down to him by some familial Old School, though Kerouac—another New England working class boy—must’ve helped him get gone.
Walter Benjamin once said your capacity for happiness can be measured by how far you go when you run away from home as a child.[1] I don’t know how far Banks got as a child, but he went a long way as a very young man on the run. He broke out of Colgate College in the middle of his freshman year as a scholarship boy and headed out to join Castro in Cuba. He made it as far as Florida. Versions of that trip and another Kerouacian one in a “borrowed” car with a buddy made it into his last published novel, Foregone. The unrelenting pace of that book and the nature of its anti-hero—a dying auteur who’s out to blow up his own goodie persona in public—will take on new resonances in the wake of Banks’ death.
I’ll go back to Foregone and launch into Cloudsplitter—the novel about John Brown that’s Banks’ most ambitious work—but I’ve just read through Project Gutenberg’s version of the book he “remembered most vividly from childhood…
Toby Tyler; Or, Ten Weeks With a Circus, by James Otis, in the 1938 edition illustrated by William Couse. I own a copy and have recently reread it, some of the time in tears. My parents didn’t read to me or my three younger siblings, and my brother Steve, two years younger than I, tells me that somehow by the time we entered school he and I were able to read, and he remembers that I read it to him around that time, when we were starting to fantasize ways to escape our increasingly turbulent and dysfunctional family. For two frightened little boys in rural New Hampshire in the mid-1940s, running away to join the circus was a powerful draw.
I ran with Toby too when I was a ten-year old in New England. Though I only barely remember my first trip. Maybe because the circus on offer wasn’t full of thrills. James Otis was a cautionary Victorian tale-teller not a Twain-y freedom rider. Toby the orphan boy finds out quick he’s exchanged a grumpy uncle/caregiver for a brutal boss. He gets to have a pet monkey and he gets his first kiss from a charming bareback rider, but what he wants mainly is to slip his overseer at the circus and get back to the home he’d forsaken.
I doubt Banks was moved most (as a boy or an elder) by the lure of the big top. Toby Tyler’s ender might’ve been more galvanizing since the hero hops on a kind of white boy’s underground railroad as he runs away from the circus. I suspect what really mattered, though, was Banks’ experience of reading the book to his younger brother. The sense of mastery and consolation and fraternity Banks got then must’ve stayed with him. (It all belongs in any back story breaking down how he found his vocation.)
Banks surely loved his brother. When mine died he sent me lines from his heart:
Oh, Jesus, Benj, that’s terrible news. So sorry for you, man. I have a brother just two years younger than I who is my closest companion, except for my wife Chase, especially as we age together. He’s my memory and my mirror.
Russell became an online friend over the last few years. We weren’t intimates, but I belonged to his extended family of readers. His way in the world made him seem almost like a big brother to us. I’m sure we’re all feeling forgone now. Thanks to his novels, though, we’ll see him again in the mirrors he carried along the road.
Note
[1] Banks’ travel book, Voyager, reminded me of Sterling Hayden’s journey. (Hayden’s autobiography had the same title.) Banks was all in (in fun) when I suggested the actor should come back from the grave to play Banks in the movie.