GUEST PROFILE: WE’RE ALL SOMEBODY ELSE WHEN WE’RE ELSEWHERE - Part 1

Being the first of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

The hotel where I am to interview the author Benjamin Black sits in the city center, smack dab in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis. The atrium is a contrast of styles: Georgian and Oriental. The walls are painted salmon pink and decorated with oil paintings of horses and birds displayed alongside Japanese prints of subdued scenes of pastoral grandeur. Green and yellow wing-backed chairs are arranged around glass-topped wooden tables decorated with black lacquer and gold leaf. The Eastern European serving girls ferry trays bearing pots of Irish tea and porcelain bowls of sugar and milk across the marble floor. A pair of stately looking palms presides over the stairwell that leads to the lobby.

The atrium is surrounded by five stories of curtained windows and is topped with a massive skylight with panes of clear glass. One can observe the fast-moving clouds as they blow in from the Irish Sea and make their way Liffeywards to the mountains. The light in the lobby is always changing -- an appropriately John Banville-esque place to conduct an interview.

But I’m not interviewing John Banville and it is a dark and stormy morning. When Benjamin Black arrives, his jacket, hat, and umbrella are slick with rain. He arranges them carefully at the foot of the cold hearth. I offer my opinion of the atrium to which he replies, “Mr. Black doesn’t care much about the weather.”



Banville is, of course, the Booker-prize winning author of 16 books, most of them novels, all of them unabashedly literary. For years he was the literary editor of The Irish Times. Black is the pseudonym Banville has taken when writing noir-ish thrillers. Two of these, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan are set in Dublin during the 1950s; the most recent Black experiment, The Lemur, was first serialized in the New York Times Magazine and published by Picador in June of this year.

For a man juggling multiple identities, he does not affect eccentricities of dress one might expect from Dublin’s most highly regarded literary artist. The author is dressed is dark trousers, a blue oxford shirt buttoned down at the collars, and a tie. It is Saturday morning. He serves himself some tea, which he dilutes with hot water. His ginger biscuit sits unmolested on the plate. He could be a financial adviser summoned to the assistance of a beleaguered contractor, an admissions officer with some regrettable news about an application. But asked the right question, he becomes impishly furtive about this split personality that he has so brazenly cultivated.

“Nobody knew that I was doing this.”

The decision to launch Mr. Black’s career on the heels of Mr. Banville’s greatest achievement – winning the Booker Prize for his extraordinary novel The Sea – is curious to say the least. I’m reminded of the story of Edgar Allan Poe who, in his eagerness for fame, passed off a fictional account of a man who’d crossed the Atlantic in a balloon as a true story in the hopes it would create a sensation. On the morning of the story’s publication, he went to the newspaper offices roaring drunk and confessed to anyone who would listen.

“On the day that it was shortlisted my agent was able to hand my publisher Christine Falls, the new book, by me. You had to have been there at that lunch to see my publisher’s face.”

The Sea is about a grieving widower who returns to the scene of his first boyhood crush. It’s classic Banville: a deeply flawed man obsesses over the mess he’s made of his past; but at the mid-way point the story asserts itself in a manner that is startling, fresh, and – yes – epiphanic.

   

“Knopf didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to take on Benjamin Black and it went to Henry Holt. My Italian publishers almost went down on their knees. Don’t use a pseudonym. We want to establish the name John Banville! So I published there under the name John Banville and this puzzles Italian interviewers: This book is by somebody else when it’s elsewhere. We’re all somebody else when we’re elsewhere!"

But why bother creating an alternate identity if you’re going to tell everyone about it?

“Well, I didn’t think there was any point in hiding behind it. My publishers, of course, we’re like, Look, you’ve just won the Booker Prize. We can’t keep the name off it. They wanted to do it much more. They wanted to say, John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. I said no; couldn’t do that. I wasn’t going to hide behind the pseudonym. Originally I was going to call him Mr. White because he’s a character in my very early novels, which, I’m glad to say, nobody reads anymore. My agent and my publisher said, We think Black is better. Sounds better. Looks better. And besides you’ll get much higher in the librarians' purchasing list, which is alphabetical."

The author sips his tea and regards me over his wire-framed spectacles. It’s impossible to tell if he’s joking.

There are precedents for writers adopting a pen-name when they try their hand at other genres, but Mr. Black makes it clear that he’s not slumming. His conversion came when he discovered Georges Simenon’s romans durs – the hard novels – which are distinct from the novels that feature Detective Maigret, for which Simenon is best known. Mr. Banville has written eloquently and at length about the staggeringly prolific writer, who wrote 193 novels under his own name and over 200 more under 18 pseudonyms. Banville makes no bones about his devotion: “He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary writer.”

Another author Banville cites as an “exemplar” of “existential crime fiction” is the work of Richard Stark, the alter ego of Donald Westlake. Both pen crime novels, but Stark’s novels are more hardboiled.  Westlake employed a pseudonym to convey a mode of storytelling distinct from its predecessor so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans.

“I simply wanted people to realize that this was a different direction that I was doing. This was an experiment. And I think it was a necessary experiment because I’d written a series of first-person narratives going back to the early '80s and I had to break out of that.”

And break away he did.

Tomorrow: Dear Dirty Dublin.

Comments

[dmriley]

Gee, could black letters on a sorta brown background be any harder to read? Well, let's put it this way--too hard. Sorry, I really wanted to read this interview.