SOURCE: “A Conversation with Shirley Ann Grau,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter, 1987, pp. 39-52.

[In the following interview, Grau and Canfield discuss the author's handling of Southern setting and theme, as well as exploring ideas about the craft of fiction.]

The publication of her first book of short stories in 1955, The Black Prince and Other Stories, launched Shirley Ann Grau's career with great promise. Critical acclaim was abundant—perhaps even hyperbolic—providing a challenge for the young author. Now, more than thirty years after she published her first book of short stories, Grau's credits include five novels, three books of short stories and numerous essays and reviews. To most critics, winning the 1965 Pulitzer prize for fiction for her novel The Keepers of the House ranks as her most impressive accomplishment.

Grau's latest collection of short stories, Nine Women, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January, 1986.

[Canfield:] I've heard people call you a regionalist, a southern writer, and label you in various other ways. I'm sure you have thought about this. In what category do you put yourself?

[Grau:] Well, any label you think of for anybody is always at least half wrong. I've also been called an anti-feminist, a southern woman writer, which is probably meant more insultingly than anything else, including the anti-feminist label. You've got to file people under something, but take it with a big grain of salt. Also, I think if you label, you're going to have to change the labels as time goes on, because no writer sits still. Reynolds Price has definitely changed, for example. I think I started out pretty much in the fashion of the times. And that's important, because writers are conditioned by their times. Occasionally a writer will leave the past, but it's awfully hard to change the way that the novel is done. Hemingway and Faulkner did that back in the '30s, but since then I think the novel has been moving by little terms rather than big. But I think I probably started out in the fashion of the late '40s and '50s as more or less a regionalist with heavy, heavy emphasis on place as dominating character.

Why do you think that was? Why did place interest you so much?

I have no idea. See, I'm not introspective at all. What I'm interested in is what is said on a page, not how the print got on the page. So I really don't know that at all. But when you do a novel about the rural South, it's rather hard to get away—particularly if you put it back in time, back to the '30s—it's awfully hard to get away from the feeling that climate and place motivate the people and that this is what makes it regional. But then you move on … for example, I don't think my House on Coliseum Street is regional at all. I think it has a very light background, and it certainly isn't southern in the sense that the deep South is southern. But in my later novels the backgrounds have gotten very light. Evidence of Love isn't southern at all. It's Florida, if you can call retirement Florida southern, but the background is faded and the people have come up, so it's a total 180-degree turn.

Why did you move out of the South in Evidence of Love?

In that book, I don't think climate and place and the mores of the place have much to do with it. I think the characters are motivated by things within themselves. I mean, no outside pressure moves them around. Now in Keepers [The Keepers of the House], the outside pressure is the source of conflict—in this case, the black/white thing. There's no black/white thing in Condor [The Condor Passes.] And the southern mores do not affect it. The source of the conflict comes from within the characters. It does not come from a society impressing itself on them. I think that's the difference.

So with The Black Prince and The Hard Blue Sky are you saying that nature or place motivates the characters and has a dominant effect on their lives?

I think so. That started their actions. After all, the whole Keepers turns on race discrimination, basically, and that is the law of the area. It's not something the characters plan. It's a problem that the characters must deal with. It's a problem from outside impinging on them. By the time you get to Condor, it's reversed. There is no force directing the way those characters live their lives. Because first of all, they've got too much money. They do exactly as they please. The conflict comes because of the conflict of personality, of wills, of goals, but it's them reacting among themselves. It's not society expressing something that they reject. It's a kind of flip-flop.

In a work such as The Hard Blue Sky, in which simply surviving the natural elements is a number one concern, would you say that this struggle to survive motivates the characters?

Yes. Their conflicts among themselves are very mild. The environment motivates them. The Isle aux Chiens is pretty much Grand Island in the '30s, and a rougher, harder life didn't exist. Fishing and shrimping are precarious ways to make a living, and when you add a depression, it's far from any agrarian ideal. The source of the struggle—and I think every novel is a struggle, essentially—for the islanders comes from outside. I mean, the hurricane is going to blow them away; the fishing is going to be poor; so it's conflict from outside impinging on them. Now by the time you get to Keepers, the motivation has been shifted a little bit. It isn't nature any more in that sense. It's customs, laws, rules, but man-made this time. But because those rules only exist in one setting—the South in the '30s—that's where the nature part comes in, but it fits one step back. It's not as direct. Nobody there really has to worry about food for the next day. They're worried about essentially moral problems. Their morals are in conflict with the official morals of the area. Now, if you go one more step, I think you'll find that the motivation has shifted again with the people not in conflict outside of themselves at all—I mean not with a society around them, they're not in conflict. They are in philosophical conflicts perhaps. They're pursuing what they assume to be a desirable goal. But you see, it's come around. Society doesn't push them around.

So, in essence, the black/white conflict in The Keepers of the House is as much a source of elemental struggle as nature is in The Hard Blue Sky? It dominates perhaps both the blacks and the whites?

And then that just vanished. I think probably on a purely practical level, we all got so darn tired of the black/white issue. It just sort of exhausted itself. There are precious few people writing about it now. It's not really an issue any more, unless you're going back to do an historical novel. It's been worked and worked and worked, so we need a breather … and then perhaps somebody else will take another look at it and come up with something that has a vital statement to make.

What motivated you to write The Keepers of the House? Is it social criticism?

Basically, the answer to that lies somewhere back in why people write at all. But, I think most novels have a degree of good/evil conflict in them. It's the best conflict you can have from a dramatic point of view. But that's purely technical. It is an awfully easy way to set up a story. And it still keeps readers interested. Above all you want to hold your reader. Many, many writers forget this. If you lose the reader, you're in trouble. You've lost. I mean, it's communication—first, last and always. But why did I write Keepers? Well, I think, like most writers, you have any number of stories floating around in your head—always. You know, writers are sometimes, I think, just very inefficient computers. Everything goes in and sometimes they can pour it out. So you have acquired over the years any number of stories from a million sources. Newspapers and obituaries are marvelous, because they make it very succinct. But not front pages—back pages of newspapers. Also, people tell you stories, family stories and the like. It comes from everywhere. My students occasionally ask how you start that, and I don't know anybody else who knows either. I don't know, but somewhere very early a writer starts filing stories, bits and pieces, settings, ideas. Now, some people keep journals and notebooks, and some don't.

Have you done that sort of thing?

I used to. I find that the older notes are worth nothing because you change. An idea that was great fifteen years ago say, unless it's awfully, awfully basic, won't work. For example, for years I've said I was going to write a murder mystery and the plot is listed upstairs. But those plots don't change; who-done-its have been the same since Poe, I guess. I don't know why; I think it's largely self-taught. But writers start filing away things and then for other reasons that I don't understand either, one particular thing will pop up and demand to be heard. I don't mean anything mystic by that. It's just your attention turned a little. Then you begin locating it and fleshing it out and tinkering with it, and you begin filling the characters out and becoming acquainted with them. And then at some point, again, I don't know why, it's ready. And then you write it. I've read half a dozen psycho-analytic analyses of this, and I don't think they make a bit of sense. It's just that at some point—there it is.

Well, why The Keepers of the House specifically at that point in time? I'm sure you got the phone calls about your treatment of the black/white conflict.

It was the issue—it's hard to believe now—but that was a very big issue then. And, oh sure, there were the crank calls and the cross burning on the lawn. But in a way I suppose it was the cheapest excitement anybody ever had. My friends don't like me to say this, but it gives you the thrill of being the good guys against the bad guys. There was never any doubt who was going to win. You know, there's no equivocation from the federal government, and the local things you just want to get solved fairly quickly. So it was an awfully cheap ego trip. Not that it wasn't exciting—how often in one's life can you be a good guy? My friends would all disagree violently at that analysis. After that, of course, the civil rights movement skipped largely into black hands, where it ought to have been in the first place.

Were you trying to make a definitive statement on the relationship between southern blacks and whites? Does it get back to good and evil manifesting itself in the terms of the black/white conflict?

First of all, that was the conflict of the decade. So I think that's probably the basic reason it popped up. I've always been fascinated by, to quote Russell, “the harm that good men do”—an action from the best motives proving to be the worst possible thing. So those two just happen to come together. It also has a lot of family story in it. The thing just presented itself, I think, stimulated by the issue of the day. A lot of family stories fitted themselves together and I was able to move them that way. Not definitive black/white—when you write a book, you don't think beyond the terms of the book. See, that's the other thing. You want to tell a story, and the fact that you selected that story, I'm sure, is due to outside influences.

Why did you choose to write about miscegenation in The Keepers of the House?

It was common as dirt. After that book, I can't tell you how many people called me up and said (anonymous calls), “How can I change my birth certificate?” In a little town down in Plaquemines Parish there are pages of the birth register missing. You could just rip it out and there goes that. So it's terribly common. In my experience, nobody thought much about it.

Especially in South Louisiana?

Yes. You see, that's the Catholic influence. When you get the rather extreme Protestant churchgoer, then you get a heavy dose of hypocrisy. And this seems to just set it off, you know. The French and Italians, they didn't seem to think that way. If you look at, say, the English colonies in Africa in the nineteenth century and the French, the French blended in very nicely and settled down and were part of it. The English did their darnedest to stay separate. South Louisiana doesn't have that attitude—all of the people in The Hard Blue Sky are probably of mixed blood. They certainly should be, if I didn't make them, but unless somebody comes up with sickle cell anemia, there's nothing—it's not an issue.

So you took the issue of miscegenation and presented it in a geographical area—I understand to be South Alabama—which would not tolerate it?

That's Lowndes County, Alabama, and they were emphatically not willing to accept it. But I think really the Catholic/Protestant thing made a tremendous difference in the attitudes of color. Well, also the country of origin. Those English/Scotch in the central South are pretty uptight about many, many things. They seem to see evil lurking behind every door, as far as I'm concerned, and the New Orleans French and the New Orleans Italians just don't see it that way. The southern Protestant boozes like mad, but in secret. Those dry towns, for goodness sakes. When I was little, there was always like a second kitchen, and it always had a bar. The ladies drank in the backroom, the men drank in the summer kitchen, but not in the front room, of course. Now by the time you get to Louisiana, there is a mixture of South Europeans and everything else. Children drink wine. It's just an attitude toward pleasure that is unlike the South and so it's more relaxed: the world is good to you here. I think in the middle South, the world is a place with evils to be avoided. It's just a totally different attitude.

You started out with blacks as primitives, especially in your first book of short stories, then you moved to Keepers, where your black character, Margaret, is fully realized. Can you explain the movement?

I'm trying to remember the stories in any detail. The answer might be as simple as there's more space in the novel. In The Black Prince I was trying to create a kind of legendary, mythological time, a non-real approach, a storytelling in the legendary sense of storytelling. That's something I still want to do because I think the realistic story has rather sharp limits. Perhaps myth-making is the way to go. Certainly, in The Black Prince, there is no realistic attempt, that's pure myth-making. For years I've played around with the black myth. I think that is probably why they're primitive: they're exaggerated characters out of a legend rather than realistic people. I mean they're not people, they're symbols—certainly with The Black Prince. I very much like the idea of the non-realistic short story. It's devilishly hard to do. There's a very good technical reason for selecting blacks for that role: they're larger than life and brighter colored anyway. It's easier to focus on them as fixed stage figures. I think that's what's there. I've only attempted that non-realistic myth-making once again, in “The Last Gas Station.” Of course, you're looking at stories for content, and I see them as a series of technical constructions. This is why I say so often that I've never thought of that. Until now, I hadn't realized that the blacks in the early short stories were primitive, but I think they're mythical characters.

Sometimes critics try to read too much into fiction, but I wondered if you were mirroring society's view of blacks, in moving from the early primitive black to the more fully developed character.

Well, first of all, I think that writers inevitably reflect the society. You just can't help it. You're a creature of your time and place. Part of the difference, I guess, is just moving from the short story to the novel. But, I think also the critics’ view and yours and my view are at loggerheads most of the time, because I would never see a spread like that. I would never see that connection, but you see, that's what fiction is supposed to do. That's my other theory—and I have theories about almost everything. I think a writer's job is to put it out there and let it mean—there is not one meaning to it. It means whatever the reader sees in it. You can't put meaning in it any more than anybody else, any other reader. It means different things to different people, which is of course why you can go back and read it over and over again. Sometimes I go back and read. I read Jean Rhys's novel the other day, and I was amazed at how much I hadn't seen the first time. It changes. I really believe that what a writer meant to say isn't relevant. It's what is out there, so that whatever you see in it is truly there.

When did you discover that you seriously wanted to write?

I've been writing stories for a very long time. When I was a tiny child, I remember printing my stories so they looked more like print than handwriting. There is never a place in anybody's life when you say, O.K. this is it, I'll do it. You drift, openings come to you, and you take them. You end up in places you never dreamed you'd end. Chance plays a great part. For example, I started out very much wanting to be a classics scholar. The school in Montgomery started Latin about the fourth grade and you started Greek in about the tenth, but when I popped out into the real world, I could see that the university system could absorb about one classics scholar a year in their teaching ranks, so that had to go—purely practical. Because I like universities and I like teaching, I thought, I'll get a Ph.D. in English and teach and write. It seemed like a good idea. I think it would not have been. But, anyway the head of the department said no women would be teaching assistants in his department. And then I said, well I can't go into a thing until I've tried it. I can't try it here, and I don't see a reason in the world to beat my head on that. I didn't like the rules of the game, so I quit. Just about then my free-lance pieces began to show. So I said, O.K., follow where the doors open. It's a long way from classics, isn't it?

You've said you want to be in the Carson McCullers tradition of southern literature. Why is that?

You mean, why not Faulkner?

Why McCullers, not even as opposed to Faulkner.

Oh, she's grossly underrated right now. She has that element of legend-making that I find so attractive. All her novels have strong non-realistic qualities, you can almost call them surreal. She, more than anybody else, makes legends. Her characters are always bigger than life. Flannery O'Connor tries to do very much the same thing, but I think in her case the theological input kind of overloads it. It's so concentrated that the symbols pile on top of each other, and it kind of wastes itself. But, McCullers is a really first-rate legend-maker. That's what I admire about her.

Do you think we southerners have more of these kinds of grotesque characters and are more willing to accept them?

The South has its share of any leftover Gothic, but any small town anywhere has its share of grotesqueness, whether it's people or performances or anything. In the summer I live in a small New England town, and we've got them. It doesn't seem to have occurred to New England writers, though, to think them interesting enough to write about.

Why is that?

I don't know. I've read a few books on southern writing, and really they always seem to me to miss saying anything. Why does the South value its eccentrics? I don't know. Do we put a special value on individuality?

We like storytelling much better in the South, don't you think?

Much more. Perhaps because the South was the last one into the modern world. I think it lags quite far behind. And if you tell stories, the stranger the characters, the better the stories. You might even link it to the verbal storytelling of the South. I think it's just because we were late in the modern world, so we still tell stories. I don't think it's true anymore, by the way. No one sits down and does what they did when I was small, just sit down and tell stories to children. Everybody told stories, the cook and the yardman and my grandfather. The way to keep a child amused was to tell stories. I can remember going hunting with my grandfather and his missing any number of shots because he was storytelling at the time. He was just walking around talking. I think southerners talk more, which is odd for Scotch-Irish, who are supposed to be dour.

How about a sense of the past? Do you think southerners are more tied to the past? For instance, in The Keepers of the House the past seems to burden the characters.

We have been. Again, I think if you talk about the South today, no. If you talk to a freshman in college, they do not seem to have any sense of the past—I know my children don't, so I think there may have been a profound change between the generations right there. I guess that means the South has gone into the modern world, where we value only the immediate past. But it certainly was not true, and southerners to this day have all sorts of characteristics not shared with the rest of the country. Despite all the travel and everything else, they talk more. They have an approach to life that is still regionally distinguished. You can tell, quite apart from accents, you can tell by attitude, who's where. But I hate to guess the future.

Do you think there is uniquely southern writing?

I'm trying to think what would be unique in southern writing today. A basic Gothic question, because I think, again, that's over-emphasized. Well, who would southern writers be? Welty?

William Styron, I guess.

Styron left the South entirely in his last book. You see, there's a real movement that way now. If you're talking about present-day South, there is almost no young writer whose reputation I can think of. Now, Styron is a bit older than I am. What did set him apart when he was writing about the South is probably subject rather than the race thing. But, again, I simply can't think of any young southern writers right now. I mean, I know plenty of writers who live in the South, but they do not write about the South in that sense at all, or they write very bad imitation Faulkner and we can forget that. That's not interesting.

How about yourself, for example, moving from your last novel, Evidence of Love. Where do you think you'll go from here?

The novel I've got right now is the story of a successful black family.

Will you go back to the South, then, for place?

This novel is set in New Orleans, so, yes, but I think after that—and again it's subject to change—I want to do one based on Martha's Vineyard. That would be fun. And you always must change the geography because people will sue.

You've worked a great deal with such technical devices as differing points of view. What technical experiments do you plan for the future?

Point of view—let me back up to answer that. Any writer has a constant fight with material, a constant fight to communicate. To improve communications, we're constantly trying different tricks. One of them is point of view, one is the back and forth pattern of shifting time planes. One is narrative, one is multiple narrative, that omniscient third-person narrative. They're all to bring to bear—they're all tricks to communicate more. The most difficult, and the most rewarding, is the use of symbols. Symbols say so much more than the words: if you can get a set of overlapping symbols, each generating the overtones, almost like a count in music, there are multiple overtones. I think this is the difference between mediocre novels and good ones. The symbols and their overtones play one on the other, and the construction is almost musical. All of that you can lump under technique and come up with, you hope, improved communication. You start off saying I have an idea, and then you have to say at some point that I may have it, but does anybody else have it, and how can I get it through.

In The Keepers of the House you used multiple points of view. What were you trying to communicate with this technique?

Reality, it seems to me, is never the product or possession of one person. There are always multiple ways to look at anything. If you tell a story with different voices, in theory at least you get the different facets of the thing. Though I've never done it—I've never told the same story three times and come up with three different stories—I've used point of view to explore the ramifications of a narrative. I tend to use it to move the narrative along. The drawbacks are that unless you make your change very marked, you're going to lose your reader, and you can't change very often. But, of course, sometimes you can. I can't remember who wrote this short story, but once I saw multiple narratives in a short story, distinguished only by italics. It worked beautifully. It was very quick.

When you read, do you read for technique as much as for anything else?

Usually I read only for the technique, which is why I end up liking very bad writers. I mean William Eastlake is a very uneven writer, but he is so brilliant in his use of symbols and I think he uses them better than anyone else, so I read everything he puts out. Most are very bad, but any one of them will have one or two manipulations of symbols that are so brilliant that you'll find yourself saying, my goodness, it was worth it. There'll be one very brilliant part in a very bad book. Most books are, as a friend of mine says, all vanilla. Most books are not bad, not good—not anything. So I tend to read books for that flash, that one flash.

The symbolism was one of the main things that the critics harped on when The Condor Passes was published, and I know you're tired of explaining it, but do you think it was successful symbolism?

For years I've been putting little phony bits of information in blurbs of jackets, and it's amazing how that little mistake turns up in the critics. They read the jackets. It marks interest, so it's sort of a stained droplet. It's, of course, not a well-paid profession. They have to review too many books. So, except for a few, I pay very little attention. Well, in the Condor, things change, they turn, they twist, they go this way and that way. In the beginning, the condor, with his feathers full of gold, is Oliver, the predator, but then in the last it turns out to be the black butler, so the issue is who preys on whom. Symbols should hold stories together. When you've got a long wandering story like this, they are a way of running a string through it.

Are there technical areas in which you wish you were more adept?

In everything. I mean that you're never, never satisfied. It seems to me that writing as a craft has gotten much more solid, much more flexible. You can do things that Faulkner couldn't do, or even poor, dear F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the last ten years or so it's become more flexible. It can draw characters so neatly, or it can characterize a whole group of characters with just a few little quick strokes. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to be lacking right now is the ability to think. Incredible technique doesn't seem to produce incredible results. As a matter of fact, a writer like Louis Auchincloss is really awfully good. He's hurt by creaky technique. And then there are others who are very technically good. Welty is an example. My, my, my, she's good. But then, when it's all over, you wonder where you've been or why you went there.

What part do you think environment plays in the creative process? For example, your environment as a mother, a woman, and a wife living in fairly financially secure surroundings?

Well, everything filters through everything else. It's all mixed up. I think we're rapidly getting away from the stereotyped feminine book. As a matter of fact, most of the female romances I know of right now are written by men. But a hack writer can write anything. But I think we're getting away from the feminine types of novels—just as well, I guess. Everything bears on it. I think education counts for far more than anybody thought a generation ago. Because you can sit down at the typewriter and bang away. It seems simpler than it is. They would never try to make jewelry that way. Everybody thinks that it takes no skill or no training to write. So perhaps we really kind of undervalue the technical part, and that is undoubtedly why I make such a point of technique. Also, I think quite apart from the writing course training, there is a general culture level that's absolutely required. That has nothing to do with sex or economic bracket or anything else. The writer has to first of all think of something that is worth putting down. So in this sense, technique is secondary and it's the difference: the better writers think better—it's just that simple. That is a matter of education in the traditional sense. There's no getting away from it. In fact, every writer is saying to the reader, listen to what I have to say. And having said that, you darn well better have something rewarding to say. So I think, and this is asking an awful lot, you have to have excellent techniques, a message that's worth communicating, and a feeling of sympathy for your characters. It's the philosophical content, I would think that makes or breaks the book. In the last analysis, a writer stands or falls by the richness of his visions.