Suzy McKee Charnas: On Writing Her Father's Ghost
Interviewed by Gavin J. Grant

In Suzy McKee Charnas' latest book, My Father's Ghost:The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances, she tells the story of her father, Robin McKee, a Greenwich Village painter who went out to New Mexico to live with Charnas and her husband until his death 17 years later. My Father's Ghost is Charnas' first nonfiction work after many years as a successful novelist. Her novels include the series Walk to the End of the World; Motherlines (collected as The Slave and the Free); The Furies; and The Conqueror's Child, as well as several young adult novels. Charnas lives in Albuquerque, NM.

BookSense.com: Given that your dad left you 40 black notebooks full of writing, were you ever tempted to throw them all away...or attempt to make a narrative from them?

Suzy McKee Charnas: I did think about tossing them. I have an impatient streak, and this sometimes expresses itself in an urge to clear away all the mess and start fresh, discarding whole baggage-trains of babies and bathwater in one extravagant gesture.

And we are talking about stacks and stacks of these things, each one of them stuffed and swollen with interleaved letters received, magazine clippings (mostly reproductions of paintings), and ancient, yellowed news items upon which the old man had written several pages of often vituperative comment by way of that day's journal entry. There are a lot of entries; I have three and a half volumes for 1960 alone.

The books were hard to handle. Every time I opened one, clippings slid out all over the floor, bits of rotten paper settled on everything, and I'd have a gigantic sneezing fit from the dust.

When I first dipped in for a look I found such a jumble of word-play, political diatribe, abstruse notes, analyses of paint and perspective and other elements of fine art, complaints about the noise, dirt, etc., of New York, and grotesque speculation of all kinds, that I couldn't see how to do anything with it. And he kept referring to himself in the first person plural ("We write for our own amusement..."), which struck me us just nuts, or else an indicator of mental disturbance, but not something I could alter without changing the flavor and authenticity of the original...but who would read a book full of this kind of thing?

I thought about trying to make a novel out of Pop's story, but to tell the truth, as a novel it would be so depressing that you couldn't expect anybody to want to read it, not even people in the family. The events of his life are few and grim. It's the spirit of the man that catches your interest and amazes and entertains you, so why present that sealed up behind a thick veil of invented narrative?

Which is, I guess, the major problem of writing non-fiction (a project new to me): nobody has anything but bits of perception about anybody else, so that our ideas of the identities of people close to us are just accumulated perceptions assembled by our own consciousness into supposedly coherent entities (a person's "personality" or "character" and history). This also explains why, when writers interview the neighbors of the local serial killer, all they ever get is what a nice, quiet, polite, regular guy he was, and how astounded everyone is about the severed heads in his freezer: he offered glimpses that added up to nice, quiet, polite, regular guy in their eyes, so that's what they assembled and assumed was his real self.

If you're writing about somebody else's life, how in the heck do you organize your perceptions of him to reflect that person -- rather than the inside of your own head with all its expectations and prejudices?

My conclusion is that you don't, really; but I kept thinking about it until I found a workable strategy: I decided to show Pop from the outside using my memories, illuminated by quotes from his journals, which represent Pop's view of himself and his world from inside. Of course, I am still doing the selecting of journal excerpts so my view rules overall -- but at least Pop got a voice in my book about him. He gets his own voice as he set it down on paper saying what he was moved to say, not just as I recall hearing it saying what I remember him saying.

It was a strange project for me. I'm an experienced novelist, used to "creating" characters with reasonable efficiency and colorfulness. I didn't want to just "create" Robin for you; I wanted to make the real man as accessible as possible to readers, so that they could join me in musing over his strange, self-sequestered life. I used his last 18 years, spent with my husband and myself in New Mexico, as the organizing principle and filter through which to show you what I came to know about the old man, and some of what he knew of himself.

Without the impossible task of giving a complete account of my father, I felt free to give the best account I could -- including using whatever artistry I could to emphasize the entertaining and interesting parts of that account. You do this for the readers' sake, but also for your own: a writer has to be interested and entertained by what she's writing while she's writing it, or it's just another slave-job you can't wait to get away from.

Even with the journals, though, I never would have considered doing such a book -- except that I had another leg to stand on. I had thought (in the mid-80s) about writing a stage play about my dad.

I'd made a file of notes, some even ordered into scenes, recording real conversations with him right after they had occurred and many of these became part of the book. Without those notes, I wouldn't have trusted myself to capture the flavor of those exchanges. With My Father's Ghost I wanted to make the work true to the relationship my dad and I had in those last years, and true at the same time to his understanding of himself. As true as I could, anyway, which isn't very; but it's truer than, say, a book about an anthropology professor who's a thousands-of-years-old vampire.

Is it some basic kind of respect for one's elders, do you think? That you don't want to interfere with the authenticity of their being even after they're dead (although of course it's impossible not to, one way or another)? That you don't want to reduce a real, important person in your life to a just verbal artifact not that far removed from a character in a novel?

Sometimes still I look at that stack of volumes and think about tossing them out. As long as they're there, I have this nagging urge to go read the rest of them, because I know there's more great stuff in there including several stories and story fragments with a gritty, noirish tone that I think are very striking -- but buried in pages and pages of rambling, grousing, and bizarre paranoid fancy.

I'm hoping to put some of these longer bits up on my website, for those who are interested.

How did the rest of your family take to your writing a book about your father?

They were interested during the process, and all agog to read it when I finished. Most of my surviving family members barely knew my dad, since he and my mother divorced when I was pretty young. His parents and my mother's family had never made any sort of rapprochement that could have kept some kind of contact going. By the time Robin came out here, he was this distant, self-enclosed figure of mystery that nobody knew -- so far as I'm aware, anyhow.

Nobody was afraid I'd reveal frightful secrets from inside my nuclear family when Robin was still part of it. For one thing, my mom kept having Pop round to dinner for years after he left the household. This is not something a sane and intelligent mother does with a dangerous lunatic, an aggressive drunk or doper, a secret gangland hitman, or a guy who molests his kids, and Mom was both sane and intelligent. He'd always been an enigmatic figure, but never a threatening one.

Most of my family having read the book, have expressed amazement at how much was going on among us that nobody else in the family knew about, but that's also partly a function of dispersal and the increasing busyness of everybody's life these past 20 years. People guard their privacy more than ever, and don't have time to inquire into each other's lives the way folks used to do, visiting and hanging out on the porch or over the fence to gab and joke. Even now, my closest sister complains that to find out what's going on with my life she has to visit my website.

I'd bet that more than one of the relatives has begun to think about doing a book of their own, about their branch of the family. A book like Ghost can encourage people's hope that there is meaning and strength in their own family story, if they take the time to look beneath the surface and concentrate on what they see.

Do you think writing the book some years after your father's death made it easier to see the book as a whole piece removed from him?

Actually, I think it let me to move closer to him, in a way. Remember, we're talking about seven-or-so-year gap between his death and the start of writing the book; and we're talking about yours truly, whose memory, unaided, is a darkling plain if ever there was one, lit by the occasional flash of lightning -- and that goes for everything, not just family stuff, and has been so as far back as I can, well, remember. I think Robin would have quietly drifted off into the darkest shadows of that plain, except for those journals.

There was that voice, the turns of phrase that I remembered, the playfulness with language, and the melancholy and cynicism that were the hallmarks of his nature (along with his unstinting love for animals) in his later years...right there in my face, bright and present as anything. I found it again in the notes I'd made, when I dredged those up and read them: the voice, the timbre, like a solo viola. That worked on my memory the way scent is supposed to work on most people. It let me see everything again, bright and fresh.

See, I'm not a visual writer. I don't "see" a story unroll inside my head like a movie (although I have learned to deliberately create stage scenes in my head sometimes, to work out the physical aspects of a scene in a story).

Instead, there's a voice, or a set of voices.

No, I do not wear an aluminum foil cap the rest of the time.... I think there are writers who see visions, and there are writers who hear voices. Me, I'm the auditory kind: the story comes in a sort of more-heard-than-seen feed of words that first makes itself perceptible just behind and below the right ear (I've thought about this because it strikes me as so odd). It often starts with dialog between characters in a scene that may be discarded later but that is crucial to my being able to get started. Or a piece of music will set the tone of my thinking for a while, until the story starts to verbalize itself.

Here I had the suddenly re-invigorated voice of my old dad jumping off the pages of his journals and my notes. It was a fantastic gift, to an auditory responder like me.

On the other hand, yes, the time gap helped; in the sense that the Robin who lives in the pages of Ghost is a construct, and a very incomplete one at that, while the real Robin in his lifetime was much more difficult to grasp and understand. I was better able to make my authorial selections of details about him because there was no constant correction going on through daily encounters or reminders of the the real, constantly changing, and much more complex person himself. In that way, time made him more like a fictional character, subject to my creative will and judgment, than he would have been as a living man I was trying to pin down on paper.

Maybe that's why the play remained only notes; it could never feel true enough to Robin as I interacted with him daily and had more conversations.

Do you have much of your father's art? Were there ever plans to include some in the book, or put some on a website?

I have quite a few of the smaller pieces, mostly paint on paper. I sent them, along with a bunch of photographs, to my editor to see if Tarcher would want to include some in the book. They are using some of the photos in the book design, which is great. And yes, I'm planning to put up a revised version of my website, with a gallery of some of Robin's art as well as some more excerpts from his journals.

There are some abstracts with intense color that I think will look absolutely smashing on the computer screen. One of the things Robin was very insistent about was the difference between light as color -- the colors of the spectrum broken by a prism, say -- and light reflected from pigment. The latter is usually a rather muddy approximation of the prismatic brilliance you can see most easily in stained glass, say. For his colors, that he struggled so hard to make as clear and pure as spectrum colors, to be visible with the brightness and strength available now electronically is both just and very pleasing.

Then I think I'll have some of a particularly handsome set of small abstracts framed, and hang them in the hallway at home.

When your dad moved to New Mexico from New York, he trashed the huge piece of art he'd been working on for years. Did he ever talk about it after that?

He never mentioned it again, after its destruction. Before I moved out west, when I'd come visit and see the piece as he was working on it, he always spoke of it with pride and admiration (for the piece, not for himself as its creator; his modesty was appalling sometimes). He was clearly pleased when I expressed my own admiration. It must have been a horrible experience, having to destroy it (or feeling that he had to destroy it), so it's not surprising that he never referred to that event afterward. I'm sorry I didn't try to get him to talk about it, but I was too busy sparing his feelings (and mine too, no doubt). I should have been braver.

Did anyone in your family inherit your father's painting skills?

Yes, we both did -- or else we got them from Mom. She was an artist, colorist, and a textile designer; although she had begun life as a fine artist. Hers was quite a different story from my father's, and illustrative of the different options available to male and female painters with serious aspirations.

One sister trains and sells dressage horses; she has abstract paintings of her own on her walls and has done some sculpture in bronze.

As for me, I got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan, on the basis of my childish portfolio (actually, I think my sister got in too, though she went to school elsewhere). I could sure draw a mean horse myself, in those days. But my eyesight was always bad, and that meant that it was hard to do what I liked best, which was line drawing, requiring very close observation. So I turned to words instead.

Maybe that's my real inheritance from my dad: writing. I've only done a dozen or so books so far, but he left 40 volumes. I guess you could say the old man was a writer, couldn't you, even if he never got to be a published author?

What was it like growing up in New York City? What about it makes it work so well as the setting for children's books?

I think it's the sense of boundless potentiality in a dense and vital concentration of population and activity.

For me, growing up in New York was incredibly stimulating. You never knew what you were going to see when you turned a corner, from a strolling horse that had escaped from the 89th Street stable to a guy sitting on another guy and banging his head on the sidewalk, to a movie star walking her greyhounds, to a bag lady with whole Sunday Times tied round her feet for shoes. And the city itself is so rich in elements that can be turned, imaginatively, into the settings and the origins of adventures: the docks and warehouses and derelict loft buildings, Central Park with its mysterious caves and dells, the great museums that have all sorts of hidden life pent up in them and just itching to get out and make trouble, the low-life vigor of whatever slum areas are left, the hidden warrens of service passages under the streets and buildings, various ethnic neighborhoods closed in clannishly on themselves...

Of course, I've got a particular, time-bound viewpoint on all this. I grew up when kids still roamed the city pretty freely (while their parents worked), armed only with admonitions not to talk to strangers, a few bucks, and a bus pass, pretty much. You were on your own and trusted to be smart enough to take care of yourself, so you mostly were and did. The YA author's problem of getting the parents offstage so the kids can have adventures is easily solved because kids were so much on their own anyway, at least in those days. Now, I'm not so sure; but I get the impression that kids living in New York now still have the same feeling of coping, mostly on their own, with a varied, exciting, unpredictably dangerous environment, and out of that edgey sense of self-reliance good stories can be made.

I'm thinking mostly, of course, of urban fantasy, because that's the kind of story I like to read (and write). The city is already so fantastic by nature that it only takes a little nudge to push a fiction about it over the edge into magic. The same goes for that other great city, London, and good urban fantasy has been written about other sizeable cities -- Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis. They are natural settings for weird and wonderful events. Nothing is clearly delineated or homegenous in a great city; it's all overlapping ambiguities, shifting and changing and soaking up "alien" elements by the boatload, so it's ideal for imaginative mining. As an author, I wouldn't give up my own childhood in Manhattan for anything.

What I can remember of it, I mean.

Why do you think Robin lived his life so privately, so far -- although not physically -- from his family?

I think the distance he chose was in part a way of concealing how unsuccessful his bid to become a great artist was. He also had, I believe, a Romantic attachment to the improverished outlaw who is nonetheless a man of integrity -- he soaked this up from his constant reading about the lives and techniques of great painters of the 19th century. He may also have had a good, sound sense of just how much mental energy he had to operate with, and he was intent on committing all of it to the pursuit of artistic goals. Moreover, he was a true intellectual in the sense that the written word really did absorb his attention in a way that I think is rare in the modern world (except, of course, among kids first encountering Tolkien, say, or any of the great world-makers of fiction), so he spent a lot of his time wrapped up in books.

He also believed, as his journals demonstrate, that energy drawn away from a man's art weakens that art. I think his ideal was the one we all learn from the lives of artists of the 19th century in particular (which is also the ideal that women of the 20th century rebelled against and won a degree of freedom from): the creative male who casually throws off mere physical creations (children) while devoting himself to Real Creativity (art and ideas), supported in every way (including, sometimes, economically) by his unquestioning wife or mistress (or both). His many unflattering, not to say bitter, asides about women and wives make it clear that their fault lay in not quietly submitting to this pattern so that The Great Man could pursue his greatness undisturbed by mere mundane things like food, shelter, and shoes. His vast admiration of Cezanne and Shakespeare shows that he subscribed entirely to the Great Man theory of history, and the Great Man is Great because he is isolated, undistracted, on his pinnacle of achievement.

I think Robin was an example of the miserable effects of these ideas on a basically sensitive and intelligent soul. His emotional capacity was crippled early by the cold and competetive upbringing that he himself describes. If you want an example of the stunting effects of the ideals of masculinism, Pop was a pretty good one. That being so, distance and privacy let him salvage something -- independence, peace and quiet, and the single-minded pursuit of his intellectual and artistic aims -- from the wreckage of his personal life.

A bit circular, this argument, but there's truth in it all the same.

When you discovered, late in the book, as it were, that your dad had brain damage so extensive that his doctors were surprised that he was up and walking around, did it change the way you felt about him, and the way he had lived his life?

It made me feel very proud of him, that he had been able to function as well as he had; and sorry for him, for the struggle to make something of a life blighted from perhaps pretty early on by small but destructive events which were perhaps related to his drinking, perhaps not. So there was the complicating factor of wondering whether he had done at least some of it to himself, however unwittingly.

I felt a little awed, really, at the stubbornness and strength he'd showed; angry, too, because of the waste. Not to mention guilt, since, if he'd been having strokes all along, why the hell hadn't I caught on and hauled him off for treatment? I was, after all, in loco parentis with regard to him for nearly two decades, so I couldn't help but feel that I had failed in my responsibilities to some degree.

I'm sure it was all about not wanting to see problems (this is really common, I think, in dealing with parents -- we don't want to notice that they are failing, falling toward death). And about trying to protect his dignity by not intruding too much. In a way I had contracted with him to preserve his privacy when I told him that he would have his own quarters while living with us, and I felt bound to respect that bargain as much as possible.

So it was pretty complicated, as things always are in this kind of situation. It really is a reversal, child becoming parent to its parent yet minus the natural assumption of authority that a parent has. You have to get past your ingrained feeling that your parent is the one who's supposed to be in charge (and you find yourself getting annoyed that they are not, not any more).

Did your dad read to you when you were a child?

Always! He loved reading aloud, and had often read to me at bedtime. No kid of his was going to grow up without understanding from day one the magic of words, of print. I am convinced, by the way, that -- for my generation, at least -- it was being read to that laid the groundwork for becoming a writer later on. I don't think I've run into any colleagues who weren't read to as little kids; that's where you learn about the only real power a child has, the power to manipulate words.

What are you reading?

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. I've just stumbled on Pratchett (I read The Thief of Time last month), and am happily launched on a loopy exploration of his Discworld. The Parrot Who Owns Me, by Joanna Burger -- a fascinating account of an interspecies relationship, and of parrot nature. I'm trying to get into Lamb, by Christopher Moore, but it's not grabbing me.

Any books you'd care to recommend?

Patrick Fermor's wonderful memoir of traveling in Europe just prior to the outbreak of World War One, A Time of Gifts [only the large-print edition is available]. There is one other book about a tramp he made at that time from Holland to Constaninople, but he only has written to about Vienna; the third volume has not been forthcoming although it is eagerly awaited. A Time of Gifts is the best piece of travel writing that I know, an achingly clear and true vision of a period of European history that is now just a summerhazed dream.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon; a fabulous account of the Manhattan I grew up in, although a little earlier than my own years -- a vibrant city full of energetic European refugees from Hitler, in this case two guys working in the early phases of the comic book-business. More deeply, it's about the complexity of men's relations to each other.

The Vintner's Luck, by Elizabeth Knox; a splendid imaginative novel, beautifully written and filled with that broad sense of a whole life wholly lived (plus the life of an entire small community) that women authors in particular seem able to achieve without using constant wars and battles to give the story shape and urgency. Great job; stays with you.

Do you have a favorite bookshop?

Page One[1], here in Albuquerque; it's a big, independent bookstore with knowledgeable staff members and great ambience. In the old days, before the big chain stores and Amazon, Page One gave local authors a great book-buying discount and funded monthly lunch-meetings. That's no longer possible, profit margins having been squeezed badly in the past decade, but they are still a great place to shop and hang out.

[1] Page One Bookstore, 11018 Montgomery Boulevard Northeast, Albuquerque, NM (505)294-2026; morado@page1book.com