About Russell Banks: A Profile

Continental Drift, Russell Banks's fifth novel, begins with an invocation:
"It's not memory you need for telling this story ... it's clear-eyed pity and hot, old-time anger and a Northern man's love of the sun, it's a white Christian man's entwined obsession with race and sex and a proper middle-class American's shame for his nation's history." The passage says as much about Russell Banks as it does about Bob Dubois, the central character of the book. Within those brief lines are adumbrations of Banks's concerns as a writer and as a citizen, of his mastery at turning words into incantations, his urgency as a storyteller, his personal roots and demons.

Like Dubois, Russell Banks grew up in the working-class environs of the Northeast. Born in 1940 in Newton, Massachusetts, he was raised in New Hampshire -- principally in the town of Barnstead -- until he was twelve. His parents then moved Banks, his sister, and his two brothers to Wakefield, Massachusetts, and divorced shortly thereafter. Banks has been candid about the physical abuse he suffered under the hands of his father, Earl, an alcoholic plumber. As a two-year-old, Banks lost the mobility of his left eye, an impairment he attributes to a blow from Earl, although his mother always claimed -- somewhat improbably -- that it was due to whooping cough. Banks would spend a good deal of his adult life trying to reconcile his relationship with his father, but at the time, he exhibited few emotional scars (they would come later, in his twenties, manifested by a pervasive rage, heavy drinking, and barroom brawls).

Other than being self-conscious about looking cross-eyed, Banks says he was a pretty normal teenager, playing sports and doing well academically. Indeed, he was so precocious and quick-witted, he was given the nickname "Teacher," and Colgate University offered him a full scholarship. With a vague fantasy of becoming a lawyer, he left for the all-white, all-male school in 1958, the first in his family to attend college. 

Once there, however, Banks was overwhelmed. Colgate was then a bastion for the sons of captains of industry, and Banks immediately felt inadequate and out of place. After eight weeks, he quit. "It was a terrible failure, a cloud of shame," Banks says. "I converted that, as one often converts shame when it feels intolerable, into a political romance." That winter, Fidel Castro was in the mountains above Havana, and the American media was portraying the guerrilla leader as a hero. Banks took off to join Castro, hitchhiking down to Florida, a flight impassioned further by Jack Kerouac's
On the Road. The book justified the trip on "religious, metaphysical, social, and political terms," Banks remembers. "Kerouac was a working-class boy from Lowell, and it wasn't too hard to make an identification."

Banks got as far as St. Petersburg, where he ran out of money, and then spent the next two years shuffling around Florida. He married and had the first of his four daughters, worked odd jobs, and started thinking of himself as an artist. Always gifted in drawing and painting, he began dabbling with poetry and stories as well. He admits he was inspired as much by the lifestyle as anything else: "Bohemianism is a useful way for a person to drop out of the class wars of America."

When his marriage ended, Banks moved back north, to Boston. He befriended other writers, musicians, and beatniks living in the Back Bay, but he was soon broke. Growing more serious and disciplined about his writing, he sought an alternative to his itinerant bohemianism. He returned to New Hampshire, where his father helped him get a union card and jobs as a pipe fitter and plumber. Father and son achieved a level of rapprochement, and Banks "was happy working alongside him and living in some degree the kind of life that he had," but their relationship was still tense, and it took many more years for them to accept each other fully. "It was always easy for him to turn his back and be passive about relations," Banks reflects. "You almost had to force yourself on him, but in the end I think it was a good thing for him as well, because we ended up loving each other very, very much."

In 1964, Banks enrolled as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an opportunity provided by his second wife's mother, who offered to pay the tuition. After years of self-teaching, he reveled in the stimulation of being in an academically structured environment, and he found literary compatriots in the poet William Matthews and a group of others, with whom he established a new journal and press called Lillabulero, after a failed attempt to usurp
The Carolina Quarterly. In addition, the civil rights movement was burgeoning, and Banks participated in organized political activity for the first time. "It wasn't really until Chapel Hill that race became a meaningful part of my sense of self and sense of American history," he says. "It was an important kind of awakening."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Banks took a teaching job at Emerson College for two years, then accepted a post at the University of New Hampshire at Durham. Meanwhile, he was writing at a prolific rate. His stories began appearing in respectable journals such as
New American Review, Antaeus, and
The Partisan Review, and in the space of seven years, he published three volumes of poetry, three story collections, and four novels. The reaction to his work was mixed. Even Banks is bemused when thinking of his initial efforts at poetry: "Everybody has his apprentice work or juvenilia, and the trouble with being a writer is that you sort of have to grow up in public. I cringe a little over some of the early poems, and I make every attempt I can to destroy those when I come across them."

But more frustratingly, Banks was not given sufficient credit for the extraordinary range and innovation of his fiction during this period. Readers and critics were often perplexed by his experimental novels, which frequently put historical characters in contemporary contexts and employed a rococo style, freely shifting points of view and breaking all narrative conventions. Interspersed were books with the social realism and naturalistic language for which Banks would become famous -- melancholy stories set in New Hampshire and the tropics, exploring the pain and loneliness of the poor; the polarities of good and evil; class struggles in which the disenfranchised become both perpetrators and victims of violence. Even today, after three more or less traditional novels in a row (
Continental Drift, Affliction, and
The Sweet Hereafter), Banks does not dismiss the possibility of returning to more metafictional projects. "People expect each book to grow out of the previous book, sort of like a plant exfoliating," he says. "But choosing between these modes of writing is, for me, not a profound aesthetic choice. It's really a matter of using one way of writing to get to what you need to say. Looking back, I can see I wrote that kind of fiction -- formalistic, allegorical, sometimes satirical -- when I was most angry and disoriented. I reached for high artifice in times of disarray, and I turned to more conventionally realistic fiction when I was most affectionate toward the world, and felt anchored and solid in my life. But who's to say I won't again feel as angry as I felt when I wrote
Family Life or
The Relation of My Imprisonment or
Hamilton Stark?"

For the moment, however, Banks seems content. After teaching at New England College, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, the University of Alabama, and Columbia, he found a home in 1982 at Princeton University, where he is a tenured full professor.
Continental Drift, which was published in 1985, was considered a critical and commercial breakthrough, and ever since, his place among the first rank of writers in this country has been assured. He has earned a devout readership and numerous honors -- including the John Dos Passos Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an American Book Award, and runner-up nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner -- and by and large, he has secured the comfortable lifestyle of a working writer. Currently he is at Princeton only one semester a year, and he and his fourth wife, the poet Chase Twichell, spend most of their time at a house in the Adirondacks.

Banks works in a converted sugarhouse in the woods, writing every morning, alternating between longhand and a computer to draft out at least three pages a day. He is in the middle of a historical novel about John Brown, a mid-1800s abolitionist, and a contemporary novel about a fourteen-year-old mall rat. Disparate as they seem, the books are bound by vintage Banks themes of alienation and rebellion. He doesn't believe American civilization has evolved very much since Brown's time. "I don't think we're facing an apocalypse," he says, "but I'm beginning to fear that we are facing the death of our culture, and the atomization of human beings in it. And I think one of the quests of my own work is to identify the possibilities of resistance to that atomization."

Yet, while no one would suggest that Banks has tempered the iconoclastic bent of his fiction or politics, it's obvious from the patience and good humor he exudes that he is very much at peace with his personal life. "Over the years, I think that I've been able to make my anger coherent to myself," he says, "and that's allowed me to become more lucid as a human being, as a writer, as -- I hope -- a husband, father, and friend. It's very hard to be a decent human being if you're controlled by anger that you can't understand. When you begin to acquire that understanding, you begin to become useful to other people."

This redemptive notion -- that coherence leads to humanity -- is what sustains Russell Banks. He writes in the envoi of
Continental Drift: "Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives -- no, especially wholly invented lives -- deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is."

-- Don Lee