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Mark Spragg discusses his new book, An Unfinished Life, in detail and describes how he and his wife worked simultaneously on the screenplay for the movie (starring Robert Redford) and the novel at the same time.
You've said that the idea for this book began with the image of an
embittered old man sitting alone on his porch. Where did this scene come from?
For me, most stories start as a single scene that refuses to leave my
imagination. I've often wondered what prompts them, because they rarely–when
they first start up–appear to be connected to anything that's going on in my
life. In this case, the scene was a man approaching seventy, sitting tightly in
a chair on a porch, surrounded by a mob of half-feral cats. He kept reappearing
in my mind–occasionally in my dreams–and inevitably I started the process of
questioning myself about him. Why is he embittered? Does he own a chance for
personal redemption? Who else shares his suffering? It's the process of
questioning that ends up defining some sort of story.
Is the character of Einar Gilkyson, which this man became and who anchors
the novel, based on anyone?
Einar wasn't fashioned after any particular man I know, but his
dedication to his daily work, the land he husbands, his family–whether blood
or not–I'm sure has been influenced by the old men that participated in my
upbringing: the old cowboys that worked my family's ranch and with whom I
lived in the ranch bunkhouse. None of them were anything like the cartoon notion
we have of redneck, small-minded, bigoted working men. They were whole and
complicated men, and for the most part reliable to themselves and those with
whom they worked. They were well-traveled, almost all had fought in a war, all
were at least bilingual. They were loyal, usually open-minded, unusually
adaptable to new situations, and mostly democratic in their views. They valued
honesty, and yes hard, reliable work from their fellows, and as a boy, they
stood at the very center of my life.
One of the most memorable voices in the book is that of Einar's
10-year-old granddaughter. You don't have children (and you're a guy)–how
did you write from her point of view so authentically?
I've been lucky enough to have godchildren in my life, and to have been
close with them, to be trusted enough by them to hear their unguarded concerns;
to occasionally be allowed to help with their problems. I believe we observe
more closely that which we love, and so I've had these kids, once removed,
that I've loved quite a lot. And I purposely made Griff of an age that is
pre-sexual. She's a tomboy, she's very brave and must act older than she is,
and yet she has the same fears and dreams and hopes of other
ten-year-olds–whether boys or girls. I think there's a lot of Griff in the
way I remember myself at ten.
You also write from the point of view of the girl's mother, her abusive
boyfriend, and Einar's best friend, a black Korean War veteran. Which
character was the most difficult to capture?
It was the abusive boyfriend that was by far the hardest. To try to
accurately find his voice; his sense of being misunderstood, his burning
righteousness, his sentimentality of violence. And then to make some attempt to
represent his confusion and tilted view of life was, every time, enormously
unsettling. Some days I would walk for hours, and I mean, up to three or four
hours just walking on the prairie, trying to work myself up to writing a first
draft of a chapter that might be convincing from Roy's point of view.
The contrasting voices–young and old, male and female, black and
white–all contribute toward creating an updated picture of the contemporary
American west, where the story takes place. Have other books accurately
portrayed this part of the country or do we still tend to romanticize life
there?
I believe we tend to romanticize our lives everywhere we live, and that
we become expert in romanticizing lives that aren't our own. It's akin to
claiming that the problems in your marriage belong to your partner and are not
yours. And, of course, to label any region–or the literary representation of a
region–as legitimate or apocryphal, is best left to the polemicists. I know I
hugely admire the novels of Haruf, McMurtry, McCarthy, Momaday, Welch, Harrison,
Silko, McGuane. They all write from the western part of this country, and in my
experience, they all seem to be telling the truth. Their books are very
different but never seem contrived. But, I could say as much about authors who
write from other areas about which I know very little. Charles Baxter, J.M.
Coetzee, Charles Frazier, Tim O'Brien, Larry Brown, Jhumpa Lahiri. It's no
doubt the authority of the voice that makes the story creditable.
You grew up on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, a family business set on
a remote stretch of the Shoshone National Forest. Tell us about your
responsibilities on the ranch and how you broke away from the family business to
become a writer.
My responsibilities were to the care and safety of the hundred and some
horses we had, to the men and women and children from around the world we took
into the greater Yellowstone wilderness on pack trips, and of course, to the
land itself–which translates to working from roughly four in the morning until
ten at night through the late spring, summer, and fall. I was lucky enough to
love the work, and to work with men and women who did as well. As to breaking
away from that business to become a writer, I guess I never saw writing and
working on the land as exclusive. I kept journals as a boy, read frantically
from my father's library of over three thousand books, and always had
aspirations to become a writer. If my parents had not sold the ranch, I like to
imagine that I might be still happily living there, working the place, and
writing books as well.
What life lessons did you learn growing up out west, so in touch with
nature and out of touch with pop culture?
At times, I look back on the place where I was raised as though it were
from another century, and certainly in that we had no radio or television
reception, a twenty-five mile drive to the one-room schoolhouse, and a fifty
mile drive to the nearest small town, it was a sort of strange island that
isn't much representative of the childhoods of Wyoming men and women my age.
But, it was the childhood gift I received and I loved its quietude, and then as
a young man became anxious to experience a more urban life. I moved to New York
City. I was excited by the new tempos, the mix of ideas, hungry for the museums
and galleries I'd only read about, but I've always felt drawn back to vast
and unpopulated places. I'm in my early 50s now and have lived around the
country, and traveled when I could in Mexico and South America and Europe, but
it is the wilderness areas of the West that have always seemed a refuge for me;
a place I know well, where I can find solace. If that peculiar upbringing gave
me anything that differs a great deal from what other adults take away from
their childhoods it is that longing for a more profound sense of quietude. I do
believe that growing up inside thirteen million acres of unfenced,
never-husbanded land set up different rhythms in me.
In your memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction, you write about your mentor
and ranch bunkmate John, a WWII veteran and cowboy. Why was he so influential in
your life? Does he show up in any characters in this book?
There's quite a lot of John in the Mitch character. And I suppose I
loved the man because he so obviously cared for me, and cared that I might
become useful in the world. I was raised by parents, and men like John, who,
through a combination of belief and necessity, felt that a childhood was an
apprenticeship–suffered if need be, enjoyed when possible, but not necessarily
celebrated. They believed that my formative years were just that, formative to
the adult that I would some day be. I was aware that they held the man I was
becoming in their mind's eye, and geared my daily life toward the construct of
that man. It was clear to me that if I were a studious and diligent boy I could
sooner be useful in the world. In reviewing the journals I kept as a boy it's
also clear how anxious I was to become that man they imagined; to take on a
man's role in the world, to carry my own burden, even to become capable enough
that I might be trusted to help others. John, and the other men I grew up around
helped me to feel full of possibilities. I longed to quit being merely a boy. I
wanted to be like them.
Publishers Weekly has commented that your writing "weds the venerable
Western tradition of frontier exploration of self and nature with the masculine
school of writing stretching from Hemingway to Mailer." What writers did you
read when you were young? Which have most influenced your work?
I was awfully fond of Hemingway when I was a boy, no doubt for obvious
reasons, but when I found Faulkner it changed my whole sense of the
possibilities of language. I suppose everything I've tried to write since then
has been an experiment in how best to structure a convincing narrative suspended
between those two poles. I read, and reread, Welty, O'Connor, Lee, Capote,
Steinbeck, a little later, Gide, Kazantzakis, Garcia Marquez, Hesse, Rilke,
Miller. In short, I read every damn thing I could get my hands on. I do remember
being greatly influenced by Lawrence Durrell. Also, from the time my brother and
I were nine until we were in our mid-teens, my father required that we read a
book a month of his choosing, and that at the end of the month we give an oral
and written report of that book. My dad read largely for argument–and so his
reading list included Darwin and Kant, Kierkegaard. Rousseau, Machiavelli,
Spinoza, Emerson, Franklin, Plato, Marcus Aurelius. There were many others.
There was a lot of chest-pounding and foot-stomping in our discussions. He told
us that there were only two great themes. Our deaths, that is, our concerns
about a possible afterlife, and our couplings in the face of that inevitability.
I once asked him–it was when I was solidly a teenager–whether a truly great
writer shouldn't concentrate his efforts on necrophilia. He didn't laugh. He
suggested I reread Kierkegaard.
The writing of this book is unusual in that you and your wife co-wrote the
screenplay for Miramax's film version of An Unfinished Life which will be
released this fall, at the same time you were writing the book. How did the
writing process work?
The outline of much of the book, and nearly all of the movie, happened
over a year of car trips with my wife, Virginia. We talked for hundreds and
hundreds of miles about these characters, their motivations, their
disappointments and achievements. When we had that all done she went to work on
the screenplay and I started to write the novel. Over the next several years
Virginia edited my working drafts of the novel, and together we wrote the
various drafts of the screenplay. It was a fascinating process, in that there
were so many decisions about how best to present a single story through two
different mediums. We tried, the best we could, to let the mediums determine the
texture of the stories.
How similar is the movie to the book?
I believe they both tell essentially the same story. It's a story of
family, and of forgiveness. It's a story of extended family, of how our love
extends to our dead; of our wondering about whether they might love us back,
indeed, value us.
Please tell us a little about the making of the film.
I honestly believe that Robert Redford has given the performance of a
lifetime, that Morgan Freeman is one of the best actors of his generation, and
that it shows in every scene he's in, and that Jennifer Lopez embodies
absolutely everything we'd hoped for in her character. Lasse Hallström, and
his producing partner, Leslie Holleran, were absolute dreams with which to work;
always inspiring, open, and deferential to the themes and language of the
screenplay. I had admired Lasse's films as much as any director working today,
and Virginia and I have come out of this process with an even greater admiration
for him as a director, and truly, as a man. Leslie has become like family. On a
personal level, I don't know what else we could have hoped for.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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