Writer Jane Smiley pictured in Monterey, California in December 2022.NIC COURY
The home of Jane Smiley (Los Angeles, 1949), from which the action can be glimpsed through the computer screen, is a large, isolated house on a hilltop in Carmel Valley, a housing development northwest of San Diego, although she is keeps neighbors at a safe distance. “It’s not a ranch,” she insists, although there are also several horses living there, an animal the American writer has adored since childhood, when her first horse died in a hunting accident, a trauma she still suffers from seems gonna recover. At 73, he continues to cycle almost every day.
With long white hair and a thick white wool sweater, Smiley has something of a movie cowgirl, a realistic version of Calamity Jane, who lives in this classic Western setting with her fourth husband of over 20 years. Years. “In the past, only cowboys lived here. They used to herd the cattle along the path that led to my house,” he says. A few miles away, in 1905, the Carmelite Sisters of Mercy founded a convent and dairy farm that gave the place its name. Although today he is more known for providing asylum to Hollywood stars who choose Carmel as their retirement home. “Sometimes you meet one out there. “Once my husband found Clint Eastwood at the checkout counter at a Whole Foods supermarket,” she says of the actor-director, who was the town’s mayor in the ’80s. Doris Day died just around the corner surrounded by her animals. Also Betty White, the incredible rose from The Golden Girls. And James Ellroy resided in Carmel for several years. “I met him once but then he broke up and left here,” says Smiley.
In a corner of her house, Smiley hangs a photo from her last trip to Madrid in 2011. She is seen sipping a mojito in a bar in the city center amid the 15M protests. “I didn’t quite understand it, but I thought it was very beautiful. I felt compassion for these young people,” says the author, recalling growing up in a Connecticut Marxist commune, where she was recruited by her first boyfriend, who was at Yale (she went to live with Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters). seven prestigious liberal arts colleges for girls). Smiley asks what the weather is like in Spain and converts it to degrees Fahrenheit: This week he will visit Madrid and Barcelona to present Heredarás la tierra, his masterpiece that has been out of print in Spanish for years and the Sexto Piso now comes with one New edition reissued Translation by Inga Pellisa. With her she won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, which made her an important author. “Actually, it didn’t change my life that much. I was living in Iowa at the time and no one really cared about those things. But it allowed me to write about whatever I wanted without my editors bothering me,” he says. This no doubt explains the admirable variety of his bibliography, which includes an ambitious Viking saga (The Greenlanders) and a handful of lucid and bittersweet family portraits (The Age of Heartbreak, The Best Will and Every Love, all restored from Sexto Piso), a college comedy, an old-fashioned love story, several books for teenagers, a biography of the inventor of the computer and even a fable with animals. “As a child I loved to read the encyclopedia, I went from one topic to another guided by my curiosity. The same thing happened to me with my books,” he confirms.
“It bothered me that Lear’s daughters didn’t speak in Shakespeare’s play. I wanted to give them the floor”
Smiley wanted to be an equestrian, a model – he was tall enough being almost 1.8m tall but was told he had “narrow hips” – and then nuclear physics. She eventually followed the wishes of her mother, a fashion journalist and occasional writer, who wanted her to become an intellectual. “She was a very cultured woman. I’m like my grandparents: more earthly,” he affirms. They appear several times in the family history, which Smiley tells during the conversation. They were hard-working storytellers and loved to tell fast-paced after-dinner stories that, viewed from a distance, seem at times fictitious; As the author admits, this is where her fondness for literature comes from. Descendants of the Norwegians settled in Minnesota and led a more picturesque life. That night they survived a storm by burying themselves in the snow until the storm passed. And also the day his uncle lost the family ranch in Idaho playing poker, forcing his grandparents to work at the factory.
The author’s most famous book, endlessly praised by the likes of John Updike and Jonathan Franzen and seized upon for years by new generations of readers, is a critical examination of American myths. Set on a farm with 1000 acres of land, Smiley orchestrates a bitter family feud between three sisters, which uncovers an incestuous case involving the patriarch, the dreadful Larry. In You Will Inherit the Earth, all American legends are proven false and pernicious. The primeval mud that the Cook family is said to have stepped on in the 19th century is actually a relatively recent feat of engineering that enabled them to turn an uninhabitable swamp into fertile soil. Though the water keeps threatening to rise again to inundate the land once more and swamp their lives.
“We novelists have a political mission. You have to decide whether you want to write something useful or demeaning.”
The success of the book initially seemed unlikely. For talking about agriculture, pesticides and drainage canals, but also for his harsh image of the American family, perhaps the most false myth of all. Smiley says there’s something rotten in the heart of America. “I had an old dream: to reinterpret Shakespeare’s King Lear. It annoyed me that the monarch’s daughters hardly speak in the play while he never shuts up. I wanted to give them the floor,” reveals Smiley. “Driving through Iowa, where I lived for several decades as a professor at the state university, I rolled down the window of my car and discovered the areas I describe at the beginning of the book.” The author created Lear Larry, while her daughters Gonerilda , Regania, and Cordelia were given more practical Midwestern names: Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. If you read it today, its modernity is surprising, if you denounce the dangers of intensive agriculture, or if you roughly describe the cancer that gnaws at one of its protagonists, or the psychological consequences of the Vietnam War, or the confusion of a generation that no longer has it are able to live the American Dream with the same credulity as their ancestors. “Actually, I’ve never considered myself a writer ahead of my time. It was the others who were late.
But the book’s greatest offense was turning Lear into an incestuous father. “It always seemed to me that there was something odd about his relationship with his older daughters. Especially Regania, who is very hostile towards her father. As I began researching, I read that according to some scholarly sources, the work contained a touch of incest. I started asking around if anyone knew anyone who had suffered from it. I didn’t need to go any further: to my surprise, there were quite a few.” The allegorical character of the novel was complemented by another, almost political character. Abominable events will take place in the stillness of this idyllic estate. “Of course, all novelists have a political mission. Every novel contains a world view, even if it is science fiction. “Politically, every author has to decide whether he wants to write a useful book or a demeaning one,” Smiley replies. His first model, he says, was Dickens. “The politicians of his time reacted to the situations of poverty and injustice that were in his books. I started writing with the same desire, although they paid less attention to me.”
“If you devote yourself to this task, your task is to go to other people’s houses and listen behind the door.”
After winning the Pulitzer Prize, Hollywood made an adaptation of the book starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jennifer Jason Leigh. “I liked it, but I always regretted one thing. Did you know they offered Paul Newman the role of Larry? He refused and I always felt sorry for him. I guess an incestuous father wasn’t his type of role,” smiley jokes. It ended up in the hands of Jason Robards, a great actor who perhaps didn’t know how to give the character enough ambiguity, preferring to make him a textbook villain. Newman, Smiley believes, would have been the perfect choice: one of the most beautiful men in film history as a bully tainted by his daughters’ sexual abuse. It would have reproduced the book’s false bottom, where the landscape described by Smiley, that fertile and beautiful land on the surface, hides a rotten interior. The perfect metaphor to describe this young nation which, despite its intention to start from scratch, reproduced the faults of old Europe that Shakespeare spoke of in the original.
Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer in the adaptation of You Will Inherit the Earth (1997).
You’ll inherit that Earth was ahead of its time too, through the character of the Patriarch portraying the torment of old-fashioned masculinity and the undeniable authority of a powerful white man who believes he has the right to everything. It might seem like a cliche in the United States of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, but that wasn’t the case in the early ’90s. “When I was writing the book, I had a hard time liking Larry for all the things he did. Now, with time, I see him as an old man with dementia who doesn’t understand what’s happening, that times are changing,” he replies. However, what cost him the most was not having a happy ending. “I knew I had to go to the end, the story demanded it. I wasn’t born into a family like the Cooks, and I’m not that kind of person, so it was against my nature. Even in The Greenlanders, where I describe the end of a civilization, I couldn’t avoid two slightly prettier sentences at the end. It wasn’t possible in this one.” And yet the book contains a ray of hope. Allergic to spoilers, close your eyes: the protagonist has lost almost everything, but she has also freed herself from the burden of her family history. And he’s responsible for two young women who may embody a slightly brighter future. “I’m glad you see it that way. I didn’t want it to be a totally nihilistic book because I’m not one myself. “There is a faint glimmer of hope in the novel despite what it tells,” he says.
There are three sisters in the book and Smiley recognizes himself as Ginny, the eldest. “She’s the one who strives to behave like a good girl. He doesn’t always understand it, but he tries to learn from his bad experiences,” he says. “Since I didn’t have a childhood like Ginny’s, I drew inspiration from other families. When you do this, your job is to go to other people’s houses and listen behind the door. And then you go home and start writing. To understand the kind of education Larry was giving his daughters, he drew inspiration from the textbooks of Luther Emmett Holt, a hard-bitten (and eugenic) pediatrician who rose to fame in the 1930s and 1940s. “You never hit me. Only once my grandmother wanted to hit me with a branch and threw it away before it reached my butt because she didn’t dare to do such a thing. But I have many friends who have been victims of violence in their families. Her parents believed that they should do this.
“I learned about human cruelty from reading, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That is one of the functions of literature.”
From the rigidity with which baby boomers like them were raised – and from the need to break with this model and invent another – comes this novel, dedicated to the careful dismantling of the belief in the perfect family inherited from the religious Puritans and expelled was England for her extremism which founded that famous nation. Does Smiley still believe in this sacred institution after being married four times? “Yes. Family is non-toxic by definition. Each of my marriages has been fun and I continue to get along with all my ex-husbands. The other day we invited one of them to dinner with his new wife. I have three children and two more from my current husband, as well as the children of an ex-partner of mine who married a neighbor.The result is a very large family circle, which I think my children have benefited from,” he says. She once asked her daughter if they were suffering When she divorced her father, she had number three on her file.” He replied, ‘Mom, can you please imagine living in this family of just four miserable people for the rest of my life?’ The conversation inspired a short essay titled “Divorce: It’s Good for Your Kids.”Today I’d say I believe in marriage, but I also believe in divorce.”And burst out laughing.
It’s surprising that this woman full of light, who claims to have been raised in a perfectly kind family, should dedicate herself to investigating the abuses that take place behind closed doors. “These are things I learned from literature, from the books I devoured in my youth. The only comic book writer I ever read was Jane Austen. “That was an exception because I was only interested in ash,” he jokes. “I learned about human cruelty from reading, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That is one of the functions of literature. It is worrying that books that talk about our cruelty are being banned. I don’t think children should grow up reading pretty books because they don’t teach them anything.”
“You shall inherit the land.” jane smiley Translation by Inga Pellisa. Sixth Floor, 2023. 472 pages. 24.90 euros.
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