Remembering Russell Banks: Mary Morris on Her Long Friendship With the Author of American Spirits

I don’t recall the first time I met Russell Banks, but it was a while before the car rides began. We were colleagues at Princeton in the creative writing department with overlapping teaching days. At some point I realized that he drove from the Upper West Side, not far from where I was living. I was commuting by train which took twice as long. One day, Russell offered to commute together. “Keep me company,” he said.

We arranged a meeting place. The subway station at 72nd Street. Russell pulled up. I hopped in, tossed my stuff in the back seat, and away we went. So began our weekly commutes that turned into a forty-plus-year friendship.

In the car we talked. Of course, you couldn’t be around Russell and not talk. We talked about everything: our colleagues (including Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison), our lives, our politics. But mostly we talked about books. I had recently published my first collection of short stories. Russell would soon be publishing his breakthrough novel, Continental Drift.

I was in awe. I was a young writer, finding her way. I’d only published that one collection of short stories but it had done quite well, ultimately landing me the job at Princeton. Russell, on the other hand, was a little older and more accomplished. He had published a few novels but he had yet to publish those books that would be considered his masterpieces such as Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, and Rule of the Bone.

At that point in my life I was basically a girl obsessed with my fraught family in Illinois and my shaky love life in New York. I would soon publish a novel that would get mediocre reviews. One review that has stayed with me said that I was a very good writer who, it seemed at the time, didn’t have much to say. I had not yet found the way to convert my own social and political passions into stories. But Russell had.

He was already writing about race and class and the human predicament—how unknowable we are to one another. Indeed Russell understood certainly better than any white man I’ve ever met that race and class are the blinders we wear that make us unknowable to even our own selves. Why do we hate—or perhaps more accurately fear—what we don’t know? Or what we have never experienced? These themes have been Russell’s North Star from his first work until sadly his last.

And so in a way Russell not only became my driver to work but also my guide into a deeper, more complex world that I knew about but didn’t know how to turn into stories. It was Russell who told me that everything is political. Even if you think you are not being political, that’s political too.

For example, if I told him about a young mother I saw struggling at night with her kids in a park, I’d be wondering about her story. And Russell would wonder about her history. I’d want to know why was she alone? And Russell would think about poverty and oppression. And he would remind me, subtly, of my privilege. To me, Russell was a literary Superman. His gaze could see through anything. And he was able to do this both on the page and there in the car with grace and power and, yes, good humor. I listened. And Russell talked. But then he too listened. I think he thought I was “spoiled.” That I’d had it easy. And I suppose from a straight ahead class point of view that was true. But other things had not come easy. I’d had a complicated childhood and it was, for the time being, my only subject.

We were also both at a crossroads in our personal lives. Russell’s third marriage was on the rocks. I was in a dead-end relationship myself. Did I have a huge crush on Russell? Was I secretly hoping he’d fall madly in love with me? I’m going to plead the Fifth, but suffice it to say I probably would not have said no if things had drifted out of the friendship realm. But again, we mainly talked about books—what we read, what we were working on.

Ultimately we talked about what mattered to us most. I’d have to say that I recall less what we said and more Russell’s booming voice, his big laugh, his wide smile, his skeptical twinkle. Russell never made me feel bad. He just made me feel ignorant (though never intentionally). It was Russell who made me understand that I needed to know how the world worked if I was going to seriously write about it.

Then in 1985 he published Continental Drift. And that novel became a kind of touchstone for me—a fresh way of seeing the world and also of telling a story. I read recently that when Gabriel Garcia Marquez read Juan Rulfo’s literary masterpiece, Pedro Paramo, it was a mind-altering experience for Marquez. He read the book over and over. It taught him what he needed to know about space and time and ghosts (a major theme of Marquez’s work).

I had a similar experience with Continental Drift. It was as if the word (all those long talks during our car rides about race and class and storytelling and the world) was suddenly made flesh. I read about the collision course that the working class Bob DuBois who seeks a better life for himself in Florida would have with the Haitian refugees in a boat who are embarking on the same quest, and that story opened my mind and my eyes.

Then I went back and read all of Russell’s work from before 1985, including Trailer Park. And then I read all of his subsequent work until at last, and alas, I read the last words Russell ever wrote in the powerful triptych of novellas, published posthumously today, American Spirits. And the amazing thing about reading all of Russell is to understand that he never altered his course. The themes that obsessed him as a young man obsessed him until his dying day.

I’m not sure when the car rides stopped but our lives changed. I got pregnant and ultimately had a wonderful daughter. I went on maternity leave and there weren’t any car ride after that. And Russell went off to Alabama to teach for a semester. When he returned, he kept talking about this poet he met down there. He talked about her so much that I finally asked him if there was more to it which he denied somewhat sheepishly. Meanwhile I left the father of my daughter and eventually met Larry. In 1989, Russell and the poet, Chase Twichell married, the same year that Larry and I did.

While the car rides had stopped, our friendship went on. When I was unhappy with my then agent, Russell made a call to his. When my daughter was about five years old and Russell’s granddaughter was not that much older, we took them on an ill-fated trip to Disney World. I’m not sure how or why we decided to do this, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. It rained the entire time we were there. But not just rain. Buckets and buckets of it. We made the most of it as we ran between the rain drops in our Disney World ponchos, dashing to whatever rides were running (not many). Decades later—when Russell published The Magic Kingdom—I could not help but feel as if the origins of that novel began for him on that fateful journey as we sipped endless cups of coffee and then wine in the unrelenting rain.

The bottom line for me about Russell and his work is this: since I met him, got to know him, and read him seriously, I can say with certainty that Russell Banks, much like writers who came before him  (Dos Passos, Nelson Algren, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser to name a few), always had his finger on the pulse of American culture. He loved this country and yet he saw its flaws.

In his powerful posthumous collection of loosely connected novellas, American Spirits, Russell plumbs the depths of the human spirit, the distinctly American spirit that is. He understands that we are basically unknowable to one another. That humans are filled with dark secrets and motivations we cannot understand. We can’t really know the people who live next door. Sometimes we don’t even know the people who live within the same four walls. If we add guns to that mix, as happens in American Spirits, the results are tragic.

In our later years, I’d travel down to Florida and hang out with Chase and Russell on their balcony that overlooked the Intercoastal. He made a mean martini and we’d sit and talk for hours. Often I had the feeling that I never wanted to leave; that I just wanted to sit and listen to Russell forever. Chase often joked that I had clearly enrolled in Russell Bank University. Like the students of the great Tagore, I’d love to sit metaphorically at Russell’s feet and just listen as he shared his wisdom and his humor and his righteous indignation about the state of the world—but always, always with a smile.

On one of our last visits together he said something strange that has stayed with me. He told me that no great writer has ever written a great book past the age of seventy. Then he rattled off the names of novelists for whom he believed this to be true—Marquez, Doctorow, Roth. (Though he was friends with several accomplished women novelists including Joyce Carol Oates and Marilynne Robinson, he rarely mentioned them in these chats).

I believe I wasn’t quite seventy yet but he was. “What about you?” I asked.

He shrugged and with that twinkle in his eye said, “You never know.”

Andre Malraux once said that marriage is a conversation that ends too soon. The same might be said for true friendships. In many ways I grew up with Russell—as a writer, as a teacher and thinker, and as a friend. It was quite a journey. We had a very long ride.