Authors: Sue Miller
MH: This book seems to be about losses—the loss of ancestors, grandparents and parents, the loss of children, marriages, ways of life, and even parts of ourselves. Cath is at a time in her life when she can actually face her losses—isn’t that what she’s doing by going back to her grandmother’s old home? Is there a value to facing losses?
SM: I think it’s not clear that that is Cath’s intention in going back—her motives seem more confused than that to me—but from the start of her visit, with her arrival at the altered house, that’s what she’s dealing with. And certainly once she begins to face the reality that Georgia’s life also held such enormous loss, Cath finds a kind of consolation for her own, and a way to live with them.
MH: There is much talk of starting over in this book, and of the idea that people can re-create or change their lives—Georgia going to the san, Cath going to Vermont (several times: as a child after her mother’s death, after both divorces) and to France. Do you think people really can start over?
SM: I think there may be a few times in life, times when you’re not really formed, as in adolescence, when you can consciously redirect it. And maybe sometimes later, in times of great crisis, when you actually learn or see something about yourself that you hadn’t known or recognized before, that access of consciousness may make some small changes and shifts possible. But I do think we are, largely, who we are, once we’re adults. It’s difficult to do more than change certain behaviors.
MH: Do you think that divorce happens now, whereas in the past couples used to have to be more resourceful and find ways to live together and begin again?
SM: Certainly once divorce becomes a possibility, becomes a socially viable alternative to marriage, it undercuts the sense that one must work things out, no matter the personal costs. And that’s no doubt both bad and good. I used to love to read the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column in my mother’s
Ladies Home Journal
when I was a kid, and to think about the compromises recommended to the couple in trouble—whether I could make them, whether it seemed to me they ought to be made. And this is a question I’ve asked fictionally more than once, too. The enduring marriage is a mystery. Not always a happy mystery. But a mystery.
MH:
The World Below
also concerns itself with secrets—family secrets and how they eventually surface, and also how they’re resisted. John, when he’s told Georgia’s secret (about Seward), actually hears something else—something far easier for him to assimilate. The times that Georgia tries to talk about her experiences in the san to Cath, Cath can’t draw her out—she doesn’t want to know so much about her grandmother. And yet, you seem to say that there comes a time when knowledge is necessary and illuminating …?
SM: To take up Cath’s resistance to understanding her grandmother’s story, I’d argue that she has a deep emotional stake in wanting to see her grandparents’ marriage in a certain way, as that image of their gathering the laundry together in a storm suggests. And it’s a mark of her growth, I think, that she accepts the complexities and compromises they’ve made, and is able to imagine some of the cost to each of them in that. So, yes, pushing through to knowledge and understanding of the emotional truths that surround us can be important.
MH: Because I know you always have strong opinions about your characters as you are writing them, I’m curious to know how you felt about Cath, Georgia, and John.
SM: Cath was certainly less clear in my mind at the start of my writing than the others were. In a certain sense, she was my lens, my way of looking at the others. About them my feelings were clearer. I saw Georgia as a strong, rather fixed person, a person who has needed to be authoritative and in charge from a very early age, and has lost, to a degree, the ability to consciously register certain feelings on that account—though they are there, and surface from time to time. John I saw, and wanted to draw, as more open, more flexible. I wanted to have him growing and learning and asking questions all his life. I love the scene in which he offers Cath the trip to France, and then openly speculates about whether it’s a good thing or not that he’s interfering in her life. This kind of questioning, his openness to it, endeared him to me as a character.
I learned more about Cath as I went along, as I recorded the subtle shifts and changes in her that occurred as she discovered the truth about Georgia and John’s life.
MH: There are several moments that really hit me hard. The one that really lingers is when Joe can’t believe that Cath has been happy in their relationship when he’s been so restless. Was Cath wrong to feel content?
SM: I don’t know whether she was wrong or right. It was certainly part of who she was that she saw and understood a serene domestic surface as enough—so disordered was her early life in her own family, and so troubled her first marriage. And her model for happiness, of course, was what she understood about her grandparents’ marriage, which had that same apparent quality of serenity, contentment.
MH: So what about marital happiness and contentment? Georgia and John’s marriage was held together by mutual respect and history, but also by rituals and an almost formal structuring of the days that is far less common in today’s hectic world. Is ritual an ingredient for marital happiness?
SM: I do think that one can signal a great deal with ritual, and this certainly happens in that breakfast scene after Georgia and John have their terrible moment of recognizing the errors they Ve both made in coming together. So I think you’re right to suggest that ritual—some rituals—and people’s ability to share them may actually make their sense of happiness together stronger. May bind them, in a variety of ways.
MH: Memory is another theme in the book—its reliability, its emergence, what it offers us. Cath and Samuel’s possible romance breaks down, in part, over their differing views of memory. Samuel sees memory as hopelessly subjective and self-serving. Cath, however, believes in the truth of her memory.
SM: I think the issues between them are less important to their romance breaking down than the way each of them approaches the issues. Each is bothered by the other’s insistence on his/her own infallibility about this. Probably Samuel is
less
bothered—it seems clear he would wish to continue to be involved with Cath, in spite of what he sees as her stubbornness. But for Cath, his absolutism is fatal to the possibility of a romance between them, partly because she sees it as connected to his age, to a kind of rigidity born of age; and perhaps partly because she connects it to an attitude toward women born of the period Samuel grew up in and was part of. I thought of myself as pushing the reader to think a little about the differences and similarities between Cath, as a “modern” woman, and Georgia, as an “old-fashioned” one, when confronted with this kind of assertiveness on the part of the older man each is involved with. And perhaps, too, to think of the differences between John and Samuel.
On the other hand, Cath implicitly learns a great deal about memory from talking with Samuel; and perhaps part of her being able to imagine the passages in the book about her grandparents is a result of thinking with Samuel about history and its meaning—the imaginative entry we need to make into it to understand it.
MH: You make numerous references to books the characters read or are given—Willa Cather and Edith Wharton are both mentioned several times. I know you’re not suggesting that the reader of
The World Below
read these books, but if he or she did, what ties or connections might be seen? (Except, of course, with the dreaded
Ethan Frome.)
What does it say about Georgia that she loved
Song of the Lark?
SM: I hoped that it would suggest that she was thinking of the possibility of a more expansive life for herself; that this experience in the san had opened her to the notion of a life lived on terms different from the ones she has understood up until now to be the necessary ones.
As for
Ethan Frome
—well, maybe all that needs to be said is that I dislike that book intensely. I think that Wharton is particularly heavy-handed in that book about the inescapability of one’s lot—though this is often her theme. And in a sense, it is the theme here, though I’d argue that the tone is quite different.
MH:
The World Below
seems a very natural progression from your last book,
While I Was Gone
, which was also about memory and marital happiness, but this book is more introspective, quieter in content. In your body of work (six novels, one book of short stories)—where does this book sit with you? If someone loved
The World Below
, which of your books would you have them read next?
SM: I do think of this book as quieter, as you suggest, than some others—mostly about an internal process in Cath triggered by “the story” of Georgia’s life as it gets revealed. In that sense I feel it’s different from
While I Was Gone
, which is very dramatic, very plot driven-as
The Good Mother
was, too. So I think I’d suggest perhaps
Family Pictures
to someone who liked this book. Or perhaps
The Distinguished Guest
Both of them have less “action,” more dwelling in thought.
MH: I understand that after finishing
The World Below
, you finished a memoir of your father that you had been working on for years. Did writing
The World Below
give you any clues or help in finishing that book?
SM: I think it was rather the reverse: writing and thinking about that book—I had been working on it between and among novels for years—fed this book. In part with the sense that I had of learning about my father, changing in my thinking about him, long after his death.
MH: Any new novels on the horizon?
SM: I am beginning to make notes. I hope truly to launch myself this summer (the summer of 2002). I haven’t written any fiction in over a year now, and I feel as though I’ve been deprived of some nearly chemical processes in my brain—the way, perhaps, people deprived of REM sleep are said to feel.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion