[In the following interview, which originally took place in November 1983, Delbanco discusses connections between his fiction and his own life, developments in his writing style, and the origins of his Sherbrookes trilogy.]

Nicholas Delbanco lives in Bennington, Vermont and teaches at Bennington College, where he directs the Bennington Writing Workshop and directs the M.F.A. in Writing program. He is the author of ten novels, including the three books of the acclaimed Sherbrookes trilogy (Possession, Sherbrookes, Stillness), and has most recently published a collection of short stories entitled About My Table, and Other Stories. He has also written two works of nonfiction—Group Portrait: Conrad, Crane, Ford, James, and Wells, and the forthcoming The Beaux Arts Trio. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has published and read his works widely. The interview took place in November of 1983 at Wells College in Aurora, New York.

[Morris]: May we start with a little of your biography, particularly since some of your own experience seems such an integral part of your fiction?

[Delbanco]: I was born in London of German parents who were, in my father's case, of Italian extraction. They had been living in Germany since the sixteenth century, and maybe a bit before. Hitler caused my parents, separately, to leave; they met again in England and married there. In 1948, when I was six, they came to this country to settle. How clear it was that it would be a permanent settlement, I don't know. I think it was an experiment really, but one that took. My father, who's still alive, is now living in the third country—this one—that he considers to be home. When you come from a family like that—it's a common story, God knows—but when it's built into your expectation that perhaps you don't belong somewhere, that it can be taken from you or that you might choose to leave, this idea of rootedness and inheritance becomes an open question. We are a very old and rather fancy family in that sense; I know who the Delbancos were in Venice in 1600. But on the other hand, they've always been wanderers. I traveled—I don't want to exaggerate, my passport looks pretty blank by comparison with an airline pilot or someone who's an inveterate wanderer—but I traveled a lot. From 1969 to 1972 I must have gone to Europe three or four times, around the world once, to Central America once; that kind of continual pattern of motion was established by my parents early on. Because our relatives were still in Europe we used to go back all the time; after college I went back to England and settled there—it became a habit. It's a habit that has been broken of late, in part because I've learned to love and settle in Vermont, in part because children make it much harder to move. But even this year, I was in Europe in January. I don't mean to pretend to habitual cosmopolitanism, but I feel no less at ease in London or Cannes than I do in Aurora.

It seems that the idea of transplantation is dominant in your writing.

There's no question that that's personal. When your parents live in a country that is the third country they've actually thought of as home, then you have to call that notion—home—into question.

You keep returning to specific places in your writing, seemingly turning personal traveling experience into fiction. I'm thinking of your use of such places as St. Catherine's Island and the south of France.

I went to St. Catherine's while I was still in graduate school. At Columbia I knew the people who owned that island, and the island had the fascinating history there described [in News], starting with Mary, Queen of the Creeks, then Button Gwinnett and Tunis G. Campbell and so forth. The husband was then an aspiring politician, and they were a very wealthy family who used to fly folk down to St. Catherine's in order to have conferences; I think the previous person to go there before me was Nixon. The husband wanted essentially a little pamphlet on the history of the island so the guests in the jet could learn where they were landing. Since I was studying International Relations and he knew I could type, he asked me to do it. In the course of what became relatively serious research about Tunis Campbell, I came out with the beginnings of a novel. I can't offhand think of any location in any of my novels in which I haven't spent time. The south of France, of course, is the locus of Grasse 3/23/66 and of Small Rain, and it's a very important part of the fabric in each book.

Turning to the histories of your books, I was wondering whether they were all published in the order of their composition, or whether some were published years later or out of order?

Roughly speaking, they were published in the order of their composition. The short story collection, About My Table, of course, took care of itself; some of those stories were published before Group Portrait came out, but by and large I started to write short stories as a release from the trilogy.

It's interesting, then, that all of the stories in About My Table should be so similar, considering that they were written some years apart.

It became a desired pattern, partly. I have written and published a couple of short stories that aren't in that collection precisely because they were disparate. And the time span wasn't extraordinary, it was three or four years back.

Your first novel, The Martlet's Tale, was accepted for publication while you were still at Columbia?

Yes. It came out in July just after I left Columbia, but it was bought while I was there. Indeed, I graduated from college with a book already sold. But that was a much palmier time in American publishing; it was easier to get published then than now, and it was very easy to get attention if you were very young. So at twenty-three, when my first book appeared, I received the generic generosity given to a young author. There's still a lot of that; people routinely get more highly praised for their first book than for their second, and sometimes they can't get the second published.

And that novel was bought and turned into a movie?

Yes, but never released, fortunately. I ended up pulling out of the project.

Your earliest novels—The Martlet's Tale, Grasse 3/23/66, Consider Sappho Burning—are currently out of print. Do you see any particular reason for that? Is it a result, perhaps, of their style, their experimentalism?

It's the economics. The publisher of my first two novels, Lippincott, saw no reason to maintain or retain them, and they have long since been out of print. As far as I know News remains in print, and so that was probably a decision on Morrow's part; Consider Sappho Burning wasn't likely to burn up the salesmen's shelves. Morrow is beginning slowly—and it isn't clear to me how schematically—to bring most of them back in paper. Group Portrait's going to come out in paper this summer, so they're working their way back. Faulkner, at the time of his Nobel Prize, was entirely out of print in America, and though I don't mean to compare myself to him, that's a heartening statistic; his books, which were then out of print, now sell tens of thousands yearly. And so I would like to think of that as a momentary rather than a final decision.

Do you think the success of the Sherbrookes trilogy has encouraged Morrow to bring these books out now?

I'm not sure. I think there's a certain slow but general pattern of increase in response to the work. My wife thinks, and she may be right, that books like Grasse and Consider Sappho Burning did very close to irretrievable damage to my reputation with the salesmen and the buying public. I thumbed my nose at readability and became very quickly, as far as anybody paid any attention to those other books, an obscurantist author, a recherché experimentalist writer. I think it's taken a good decade or so for me to live that down and to emerge, insofar as I have at all, into the general popular perception of an author whose books one might be able to read.

Do you see your style as having changed at all over the years, in a significant way?

No, I don't think of it as a conscious shift in emphasis or style, though it's perfectly clear to me that there has been a radical change. But it seems to me more a function of the altered emphasis of my life and experience. I was very much, in the period of Grasse and Sappho, a feisty, overeducated kid who wanted to display his book-learning. Most writers produce books that are manifestly the productions of pretentious children and gifted embryos; I don't regret or renounce those books at all, but few publish that sort of novel. I managed to, and I'm proud of them as milestones, but Lord knows it's not a road I would have liked to continue traveling.

The books seem to become more accessible, particularly the Sherbrookes Trilogy and the stories of About My Table.

In some degree you're no longer a very good witness either, because you're so familiar with them that if they contain a code or a private language, it's one you can speak. But I think it's objectively the case that these stories are accessible. Of the stories in About My Table, “Northiam Hall” is probably the most recondite and the hardest to crack, and it seemed to me at my reading last night that the fifty or so college kids who were sitting there listening to me read that story were at least able to stay without falling asleep—not something that I could have claimed a decade ago.

The book that seemed a breakthrough for you was In the Middle Distance, for there you combined a more straightforward kind of style with an interesting technical experiment, in which you turn Nicholas Delbanco the writer into Nicholas Delbanco the character, and in which you interleave a journal—another common feature of your work—with your story.

I think that is the most ambitious technical experiment I have made. It actually arose, in large part, from a course I was teaching at Bennington in autobiographies; my thesis, or the idea that emerged from teaching, was that the ratification of data can be very misleading. There's no reason, as I say in that book, to disbelieve what Proust says about his childhood just because he calls it fiction, or at least no reason to take it qualitatively differently from what Bertrand Russell says about his childhood just because he calls it an autobiography. When somebody says that something happened to him, it may have principally happened in his imagination, just as if someone says that something is principally an imagined event, it may be a true psychic revelation. So I thought I'd make the character Nicholas Delbanco like me in certain important respects; he has my house, my passport number, some of my background—but I'd shoot him forward twenty years into events that couldn't possibly have happened to me yet (although as I'm beginning to tilt toward his age, I'm feeling a little nervous). But he truly is an invented figure. He happens to have my name, and therefore it seems like an autobiographical document. On the other hand, when I was writing, I did keep an actual journal which recorded personal things that were happening, like the building of a house and so forth. That actual journal became the novel that my fictive creation tried to construct, and of course he couldn't write it very successfully. I also think it was important that that book went backwards, wound down rather than wound up, so that in the end, when he's the smallest, it really is something like my experience.

The retrogressive structure of the book is certainly one of its most puzzling, and most fascinating, features.

It forms an “X.” As the journal works forward, the novel works backward, and somewhere in the middle they converge, while he's keeping notes.

And the editor's notes are notes you actually received from your editor?

I was living in the south of France during the period of composition of In the Middle Distance. My wife and I were about to travel around the world—we'd just gotten married and I had money from the movie deal for The Martlet's Tale—and so the process of editing the text, which is generally something Jim Landis and I do in person or on the phone, became one of letters. I had to send him the corrections. His letters in particular fascinated me, and somewhere around Hong Kong I sent him a telegram saying: Stop the presses. I thought we should incorporate the letters—the process of the editing ought to be part of the making of the book because it was part and parcel of the enterprise. He said, “You've got to be crazy; I'll give you till Tokyo to decide.” So I sent the same telegram, and when I got back to the States he had all the letters set up in print, and we just juggled them around in the galleys and put them in. So those really do refer to the typescript text, which is what I was carrying around with me. I think it's a little precious, but it was plausible.

I'd like to move ahead a bit and talk about the origins of the Sherbrookes trilogy. You said that Possession and Stillness mirror each other in a way, and that the middle book, Sherbrookes, is structurally different; it's not divided into separate books, for example.

No, it's the pastoral interlude. It takes approximately the nine months of Jane's gestation. I think it should work that way. You have two chunks of a single day's time, with much more back and forth in memory. Then there's the more or less direct narrative drift of the period of Maggie's pregnancy. It's not accidentally a green book. My original working title for that work, actually, was Spring and Fall, which I decided was presumptuous. So then I thought of calling it The Green Mantle. In the play in Stillness, Ian does, roughly speaking, describe each of my early novels. So, yes, there is a conscious disparity.

So often the central characters in your work are erudite, artistic types—architects, poets. And in the Sherbrooke books you make Ian Sherbrooke an actor. Is this a conscious effort on your part?

I should first talk about this a little generally. My own feeling, though I don't know whether you'd share it, is that I always have had a rather surprising ability to be someone other than myself as author; I was always pretty good at old women and very old men and very young children and foreigners and folk like that. But I never, to my satisfaction, was able to create a character anything like the author, and who was nonetheless persuasive or persuasively alive. It seemed to me that the weakest figures in my fiction were always the ones closest to home. In Ian's case I knew that and was able, I hope, to make it somehow function within the novel, because as you know it's a more or less technical Bildungsroman; the point is that he's a beginner at the end, so that he's just working his way into something like the power and the actuality of the elder generation by the end of the trilogy. There it was functionally useful, but I still think that, of the characters in the Sherbrooke family, Ian is manifestly the least vivid. He doesn't have the kind of clarity that Judah and Hattie and Maggie and even Jane have. He's a shape-shifter, a beginner.

Even in the final book, Stillness, which becomes his book?

I mean it to be his book. As we've said, Stillness mirrors Possession, each takes place in a single day, and Possession is essentially Judah's book; Ian never appears, but he's always thought about. The reverse is true in the last of the trilogy. So, yes, the book's tilted downwards a generation, and the third one is Ian's, but he is not clear yet; he's becoming rather than being, and he's a more or less technical example, as I've said, of a figure in a Bildungsroman; he's someone who starts at the end.

Actually, I had always had trouble wrestling with figures who were somewhat, or very, similar to me, but that did not seem to be the case in the short stories in About My Table. I felt liberated, in that particular form, to write about a figure who in one way or another was cognate to his creator. As far as I'm concerned, in fact, all the other figures in the stories are caricatures or only partially realized; they are not stage center. It's a book about nine men and certain witnesses to their world. But I wasn't trying to make the elder generation vivid or the wives or children vivid—I just wanted to focus on the male protagonist. That was a breakthrough, because I never could do it before, and I think I can now. This is a long way around to answering your particular question: why should all those figures have that kind of culture? The answer is that I was trying to stay a little closer to home and those are worlds with which I am more or less familiar. I didn't really do any full-scale submerging into another character. Sure, I asked my brother, who's a doctor, about the influence of altitude on pulmonary statistics; and sure, I asked an architect how you build such and such a structure. But I didn't feel that I had to go very far afield at all in those stories in order to invent simulacra.

But your characters do, ultimately, claim authenticity and depth.

I hope so. I'm not sure where I acquired this distaste for books about the writing of books. It's possible that John Gardner had a lot to do with that, because as you know he went full tilt against the novelist as the center of his own fiction. Certainly, when I was writing Grasse and Sappho, the experimental mode and the shaping of the book as object were central to me. I didn't want to have my protagonist a novelist; he never was. He came perilously close a few times, as in “Northiam Hall,” where he writes about a dead poet and is a sort of cultural historian. Or in “About My Table,” of course, where he's a working journalist, and in “Marching through Georgia,” where he's a figure whose expertise happens to be in the subject of “News.”

To return to Ian and the Sherbrookes trilogy, it seems, at the end of Stillness, that Ian has no choice—given the forces of family and the lines of connection between generation and generation, which are always strong ideas in your work—that he almost has no choice but to return, and then not to leave, at the end of the book, when Maggie leaves with Jane and Kincannon. That he almost has to take, by force of blood, the family name.

I wouldn't quarrel with that. I think he certainly acted as if he had an alternative, and could no doubt have remained a wanderer, but it would have been renouncing something that he finally was willing to claim.

So would you deny the validity of renunciation, which is another idea that runs throughout your work—for example, in News? And though Ian does renounce the family early on—

No, I consider that Ian is making an affirmation, albeit a bleak and chilly one, at book's end. I consider that it is his first acquiescence in who he was and is. Maggie's closer to renouncing at novel's end. I think probably my reading of Henry James, which was pretty serious those years, had something to do with the way I ended Stillness. It's in no technical sense a closure or a foreclosure, though I don't think I left the door open to make it a quartet. It's not, however, a definitive closure; it's more James's notion of a concluded “affair.”

You earlier mentioned John Gardner, who was a close friend of yours and, at one time, a colleague. Given your interest in colleagueship and collaboration, as evinced in Group Portrait, I was wondering if the two of you ever actively collaborated in any way, or ever actively edited each other's work? I know, for example, that you swapped characters for your Vermont books.

No, we never actually collaborated on anything, though we each often read the other's manuscripts. I certainly looked over his shoulder at what became On Becoming a Novelist and On Moral Fiction. And I read, for instance, the unfinished book of his, Stillness, the title of which John let me borrow for my own book. But I don't think he asked me for line readings, or that I offered them. When he fell very ill, he showed me stuff that he wanted my reaction to, but it was mostly critical work. Still, one doesn't have to ask, “What do you think of my paragraph?” in order to be a colleague.

Do you go along, basically, with Gardner's aesthetic, with the idea of moral fiction and art in the great tradition?

I think if the question is whether I go along basically, the answer is yes. I have quibbles and quarrels, but I don't think he's utterly wrong. I think he's more right than wrong.

You both seem to go about it differently, however, making those affirmations. I think particularly of your ideas on love, on the distinction between love and possessiveness, on “fathering,” and on the confusion of family and love and lust.

These are compelling issues, problems perhaps to me, but I don't think of them as problems to be solved, as if once I get “fathering” right, then it won't be an issue any longer. I think in that way I'm far less programmatic than John was. In his best moments as a novelist I think he stepped off the soapbox and wasn't programmatic. But it's not as if I think of these as ideas to wrestle with. I can see how a critic might. Those are major themes, but I don't have actual answers. They remain interesting problems.

Do you still feel uncomfortable, to any degree, with being “an American writer”? Given the way in which your books, particularly your early books, are so “geographically frenetic,” as you once put it, do you think that the Sherbrookes trilogy represents a sort of coming home for you, an acknowledgment of, or a reconciliation with, your Americanness?

There's no question that the locus of my work has shifted toward America. In the short story collection, there's only “Northiam Hall” that leaves the States. That is partly a geographical accident in that I spent much more time in America in the last years than I used to because my children are here and we are located. But it's also partly a sense, as the years go by and the roots go deeper, that this really is home and that there isn't any point in pretending otherwise, or even in attempting to report on any other kinds of culture. I taught a course last spring in Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, simply because I've never done that before, and because one pays lip-service to them as the progenitors of the American novel in the latter part of the twentieth century and takes their greatness for granted. Of course I'd read them and had my opinions, but I'd never really made a study of them; this year I did. They seem to me to be my masters and ancestors, and insofar as I hope to be an inheritor, it is of those voices and that kind of tradition. I'm actually doing an issue of The Bennington Review right now on Regionalism, and so I've been thinking about it to some degree, this sense of being located and fixed. I don't quarrel with it any longer, I don't resist it. I live there by choice and happily, but it's not as if I were born there.

You don't feel tied down geographically in your fiction, tying yourself to the New England region in your future fiction?

No, not in my future fiction. The novel I'm working on at the moment seems to be located in New England, and principally on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where I've gone back lately. I would like to acknowledge at some point, though it's a somewhat distant feeling, not an intellectual imperative, that, after all, the novel is principally an urban enterprise this century; I'd like to get my characters back into town a bit. No doubt their author will travel there too.