Interviews
A Conversation with Peter Carey
Barnes & Noble.com caught up with Peter Carey in New York City to discuss fiction, legends, Australia, and True History of the Kelly Gang.
Barnes & Noble.com: Our impulse as American readers is to identify Ned Kelly with our own infamous outlaw Jesse James, but at an early reading you gave from True History of the Kelly Gang you suggested that a more appropriate comparison might be made to Thomas Jefferson. Why is that? What space does Ned Kelly occupy in the Australian mythos?
Peter Carey: There is no doubt that Jesse James and Ned Kelly are both outlaws who are important within their respective cultures, but if you had to draw a pyramid of the hierarchy of things, Jesse James wouldn't be right at the top. You have a lot of other figures who were more important in your cultural life than Jesse James. He'd be up there, but not at the top. The truth of the matter is that we [Australians] really don't have, like you do, political figures, statesmen, philosophers who occupy a huge lot of imaginative space. When my New York friends said to me, "Oh, we get it, that's like Jesse James," I'd say to them it's like Thomas Jefferson, at which they'd laugh, of course. But it was said with the intention of alerting them to the fact that Ned Kelly occupies a huge space in our cultural landscape, and there is no Thomas Jefferson, there is no George Washington or Abe Lincoln. It's a different country.
I was just thinking about this today. If there's an Australian national song it's a song called "Waltzing Mathilda," and it's quite well known. But really what it's about is a swagman -- which is a hobo -- who steals a sheep and then jumps into the water and drowns himself rather than be captured by the police. And this really occupies the same sort of space as "The Star-Spangled Banner," except that our politicians and diplomats are too embarrassed to stand, say, at the Olympic Games and put their hands over their hearts while this song is played about a sheep thief. But we are a country that celebrates these sorts of characters. Now, instead of "Waltzing Mathilda," our national song is a rather dull, bureaucratic thing called "Advance Australia Fair," which nobody likes very much. But Ned Kelly is like that. And the song "Waltzing Mathilda" is sort of like our Statue of Liberty song [Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus"], because when you sing that song, you inhabit imaginatively the position of the poor and the disposed, and you are those people when you sing the song. It has that emotional effect.
B&N.com: Why did you choose to have Ned Kelly tell his story through imagined notebooks, and how did you develop his voice?
PC: Within the novel, the gang, very late in the story, comes to rob a bank in a little town called Jerilderie, and at that particular time Ned Kelly's passion is to have his story explained to the world, and he's written this 56-page letter which he's eager to have printed and distributed so the government and the people can see how it is that he got into this particular situation, that he's not a bad person, and that this happened and that happened. The historical Ned Kelly did exactly that. So there is this real, 56-page, handwritten document called "The Jerilderie Letter," and it has a very particular style. It's sort of crudely punctuated, the voice of an uneducated but very intelligent man; it's angry, it's funny, and it's a cry for justice. It's an extraordinary document. So I read this -- not the original, but a transcript of it -- 30 or 40 years ago and it really impressed me. As a matter of fact, at that time I had just been reading James Joyce's Ulysses and Samuel Beckett, and there was something about the Irishness and the unpunctuated rush of words that reminded me of something quite literary, but it's not a literary work. And so when the time came when I thought it would be interesting to write the story I had only one thought in my head, which was this voice. Those letters are like having your character's DNA; you can build the man from beyond the grave. Now, of course in the end it's not a parody of that, and there's all sorts of other issues at work.
One of the other powerful factors in this work is that I grew up in a small rural town in the state of Victoria in Australia, not so far from where Ned Kelly lived, and in the late '40s and early '50s I knew kids that talked like that: They'd say, "I come into the room and there he were." And so adopting this voice was a very natural thing for me, and I never really felt like I was making it up, and I never felt hampered by the character's lack of education or vocabulary, because it's like giving voice to the voiceless, in a sense.
B&N.com: What sort of research did you have to do for True History?
PC: I'm sitting here now and I'm looking up at my shelves and my eyes are drifting around. I mean, there are 19th-century books like Australia Illustrated, which is a lovely Victorian travel book. There's a book -- I'm standing up to look at these things -- Horses, Dogs, Birds and Cattle; vet books from the 19th-century; anything that touched the edges of this territory. There's a book called The Drover; they are the people that go around on horseback taking cattle across the outback. I believe in this country the cowboys were first called drovers. Such different, odd little things. There's hardly anything that I read that didn't touch on it somewhere, but most things didn't touch on it directly.
B&N.com: What about the historical Kelly? In the novel you write about these far out newspaper accounts written by people who couldn't have been further removed from the scene. How much of the historical record is to be trusted?
PC: If you go to a library in Australia you'll probably find, let's say, 700 books on Ned Kelly. I didn't care too much about what really happened or didn't happen. I went to Ian Jones, who I think is the most reliable of all the Australian historians of Ned Kelly. And I went to a particular book of his called A Short Life. So when I was looking at the chronology and what happened first and what happened second and third, it was Ian Jones's work that I trusted. And what I was most interested in were the things that had happened in the unimagined dark, if you like, between these highly, brightly illuminated moments in the story. There are all these set pieces that Australians know about: there was this bank robbery; there was this holdup, and so on. I was much more interested in the things that no one had had ever imagined.
B&N.com: And yet my favorite line in the book has to be this: "In the hut at Faithfull's Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed...."
PC: This happens after they do this -- if I might say so -- beautiful bank robbery in the town of Euroa, where they take people from the town hostage and take them out to a property nearby. At that time the press were full of all these stories portraying the Kellys as sadistic murderers and suggesting that they'd cut off the ear of one of the dead policemen, and all this sort of stuff. It's historically true that that night in the shed Ned Kelly addressed the people he'd held captive and explained what had happened, and he made a powerful impression on them.
What I wrote is of course fiction, and the characters are mostly fictitious, the people who'd listened to this, but the general effect is as it was reported. It's a pivotal moment in his life, because this is a boy that grows up in a criminal caste, and many things happen to him, and he does many things. But at this moment he suddenly realizes that he stands for something, and he sees the way the people stand for him, and he elevates himself. And it's from then that he starts to become the folk hero that he is today and was in his own short lifetime.
B&N.com: In addition to your speculations on the "unimagined dark," you make great use of Irish folktales and other local myths and legends. To what degree are our legends more true than our recorded histories?
There are two parts to that. Because this is such a pivotal Australian story -- I mean, it really is a foundation myth -- the child of convicts becoming this particular folk hero; the convict seed producing this child, and so on -- the thing is that he's so important to us Australians that we tend to imagine it as a totally Australian story. And we will say it's an Irish story, because it's about land, but we have not really taken a lot of trouble to imagine what has leeched through from Ireland. You know, these are Irish people, and when I was a kid growing up in the country and my dad was selling cows to potato farmers in Bangoree, it was very Irish; really, really Irish, like in Ireland. So I would imagine that with Ned Kelly and those people there would be a lot of folk custom and stories and ways of looking at the world that would come through from Ireland, but in Australia we don't tend to imagine that. So all these folk stories and ways of looking at things seem an important way to imagine what that story was.
Obviously our history comes from the legends. Speaking about this particular legend, which didn't happen so long ago, they tend to be fuzzily remembered things. And so they start to exist in cartoon outline. And one of my projects was to imagine it vividly and emotionally. The whole notion of calling it True History -- which I intended ironically -- it seemed to me that I was establishing a critique of history. If you say "true" and "history" together -- well, no historian's ever going to call anything "true history," so it's not a professional word. Secondly, it calls into question the whole nature of history, which is a series of stories. So the title is meant to do a little of that, which sometimes people get and sometimes people don't get. Particularly for newspaper journalists, they want to worry about the responsibility of the writer in distorting the history of something.
I've had lots of interesting conversations about this. I did take this issue quite seriously. In the case of this story, there are people still alive in that area that for him is family. So I have a sense of responsibility. Also, I started to think about Richard III, say, and Shakespeare and history. What we know about Richard III comes from Shakespeare, not history. Our obligation to tell the stories of our tribe or the myths of our people is a serious one.
B&N.com: You begin the book with a quote from William Faulkner. And in reading True History, I couldn't help but think of Faulkner and his sprawling prose and his great novels of the South. What debt does the book owe to Faulkner, if any?
PC: I have to give you a rambling answer. Of all the books I read when I started to read -- and I started to read a little later than most people, at 19, say, rather than 16 -- As I Lay Dying was one of the first works in terms of serious literature, and I couldn't have imagined that words like that might exist in the world, sentences like that. It thrilled me. And there are a whole lot of things about that book that continue to affect me; the formal organization of the work and the first-person narratives with conflicting points of view were burned into me, and my own work echoes that in some way. There's a debt I owe to Faulkner for that.
The other thing I think I emotionally connected with was the notion of giving voice to the voiceless. Here are these people, these poor ignorants, and they've got a beautiful poetry within them. When I look at what I've tried to do with this book, I can draw a line to Faulkner in the sense of the notion of creating a poetry. Not like Faulkner's poetry, but a sort of poetry from this uneducated man that is deeply satisfying and has a lot to do with Faulkner. The thing that struck me when I first read Ned Kelly's own writing is related more to Beckett and to Joyce. Yet of course, this book is really not like any of those people, they're just points of sparks, points of connection.
B&N.com: Ned Kelly educates himself by reading a copy of Lorna Doone given to him by his friend and gang member Joe Byrne. Are the two novels in any way parallel tales?
PC: Not too much. It is a romance. But the point is that I didn't invent this; it was Ned Kelly's favorite book. There are points of connection. I mean, it's nice that he read a book, and it's nice that I know what the book was. It isn't a parallel. It's interesting to read Lorna Doone imagining how he might have felt at different stages, because the Doones, who are the outlaws, are bastards. They're more like aristocratic versions of Ned's vile Quinn uncles who were so rotten to him. Writing a book, one's always looking for what one can use. It was all about me, looking for what I could steal, loot, use. The only bit I found I could use was the book. Lorna Doone is what we would think of these days as a middle-brow book, and it's a romance of it's time. The writing about the natural world is particularly fantastic.
B&N.com: You mentioned Shakespeare earlier. We often hear just how many people would attend his plays, rich or poor, and that whatever language is difficult for us to grasp today was for his own audience very accessible. In that wonderful scene at the end of True History in which the teacher recites the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, the people listening just intuitively get the emotion. They don't necessarily understand the context, but they understand what it is essentially about.
PC: My wife is in theater and knows Shakespeare really well, and she sits around with actors and directors, and they know this play and that play. Actually, I don't have an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's work. I know quite a bit of it and have seen it a lot, but that particular scene is one I learned in school and I've always loved it very much, so it came to me from my baggage.
B&N.com: What struck me when I first read the publisher's copy on the book was that the folks at Knopf are calling it "a Great American Novel." Do you have any sense of how differently Americans have responded to the book than Australians?
PC: It's a whole different thing. I take that as a huge compliment. Obviously my publisher is going to try and sell the book, but when I was writing the book, it seemed to me very Australian. Ned Kelly, all of the animals, the landscapes, the colloquialisms are Australian; they're not necessarily going to have any significance to Americans.
I've published a lot of books in this country, and I don't expect that my cultural experience is central to American life, and as far I'm concerned I'm sort of going out on a limb. Generally, artistically, it's a difficult thing to do. When I finished it I was really surprised and delighted to find, time and time again, Americans really connecting with it in a way that I'd not expected. And I'd say to my friends, isn't it weird. And they'd say, "No, it feels like a western," or "it feels like Mark Twain." It's disconcerting, because you're going through all this and suddenly you find some reference to the queen of England, and that really shakes you up, because somehow or other you're inhabiting some 19th-century American landscape and then this happens.
Of course, when you read across cultures, there are always degrees of understanding and misunderstanding that occur continually. It happens when I read García Márquez and when you read Garcí Márquez, or anybody from another place. We understand it in terms of ourselves, and that's what's happening here. A western, the notion of a western; there is no equivalent of a western in Australia. In Australia there really isn't a frontier. A frontier suggests, to me anyway, this moving, like one of those bands on the weather map that moves across, and you triumph at the end, and there's wealth and success. And in Australia, because of its particular landscape, there can be no triumph and success and wealth, because at the end of the journey there will probably be death and everyone will die of starvation and thirst, which is not a frontier sort of idea. Maybe I'm wrong.
B&N.com: It was a tremendous revelation for me to hear you read from the work yourself, because, as you said, when I first approached the book, all I could hear in my own mind was this southern drawl, and it worked. But it did change things to hear you read it with an Australian accent. And I also kept reminding myself that the characters were Irish as well, so that it wasn't an Australian accent they used, but a brogue.
PC: It's weird. You know the actor Richard E. Grant? Well, I was out there in Australia for the book party and to do publicity, and he's a friend of a friend, and I'd never met him, but he turned up. He said that he had sat in his room reading it with an Irish accent, which presumably he knows how to do. And he said it totally worked. I don't know how I wrote it. I wrote it in my mind mostly in an Australian/Irish way, sometimes being aware of my limitations. I'm pleased that Richard E. Grant said that, but I couldn't have gone the full nine yards on the Irishness; it's not within my range. And probably the character Harry Power, for instance, should have been more Irish than I was able to make him. But on the other hand I grew up in a culture very influenced by all of that. So I thought that what I was doing was OK and that it was heavily Irish-influenced. But I know what you mean about reading it in one way and hearing it another. Australians do that all the time. You read things from another place, and then you hear the person from the place read it in their way and then suddenly it all makes sense.
B&N.com: Czeslaw Milosz has a wonderful quote somewhere about language being our only homeland. Did you write True History of the Kelly Gang here or in Australia, and how strongly does a sense of place affect when you are writing?
PC: Oh, I wrote it here, in New York City. It was a wonderful thing to do. One is afflicted in many ways. I love New York City, by the way. On the other hand, I also have feelings of homesickness, and anxiety, too, about if an artist should be in his or her own place.
B&N.com: You think you'll ever write a New York novel?
I don't think so. Maybe in the future. One of the things this book has made me realize is that there's a lot of deep soil there that I really need to continue to work with. It was a big pleasure to get into that and to feel so confident in the voice. I'm not suggesting that I'm confident with writing the book. I was often filled with a sense of terror and anxiety and being certain I was going to fail, but there was a thing about the voice that I felt very confident about.