Writer's Room: Francine Prose

Before embarking on the publication of fiction, the formidable novelist Francine Prose was interested in ghost stories: her first memoir, 1974: a personal story, after a career spanning more than 50 years and more than 30 books, is fascinating and heartbreaking. Between 1972 and 1975, when Prose was in her twenties and newly divorced, she lived for months at a time in San Francisco, where she had gone as far away from Cambridge, Massachusetts as possible. She had chosen this place because, she said, “I was full of vertigo. It’s still my favorite movie.

In 1974, Prose mentions a scene from the 1958 film where the main character, John “Scottie” Ferguson, a tortured private detective, and Gavin Elster, the rich man who hires Ferguson to follow his wife, have a sad conversation. Elster says, “The things that inspire me in San Francisco are disappearing quickly…I wish I lived here then.” The color and the excitement, the power, the freedom. Likewise, the San Francisco encountered by Prose was not the San Francisco of vertigo, and at the end of the book she expresses sadness that the San Francisco she encountered in the 1970s is also gone. San Francisco is always already spectral.

Prose speaks to me on Zoom from New York from a well-lit room with a shelf to the ceiling and a printer. “It was an incredibly romantic town,” she says. Hope had been generated by the Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury, and by the Black Panthers, before they began to be killed; the place seemed to him to be ground zero of what had happened and what was going to happen in the culture. Later, when I notice that she’s summarizing a fluctuating respect for the counterculture and suggesting that it’s once again cool to protest, she says, “Now the idea that there’s something that you can do, and that there is something that you can protest, that you have a voice, is more important than ever, because we are about to be really confronted with it (politically).”

The friends she stayed with introduced her to troubled whistleblower Anthony J. Russo, or Tony, who fascinated her. He had worked for the RAND Corporation and, with Daniel Ellsberg, leaked the Pentagon Papers, which revealed to the misled public that the United States had quietly increased its involvement in Vietnam for power purposes, not aid. She told me: “One of the reasons I was so attracted to him was that he was willing to give up everything – and he did. He could have been a very successful aeronautical space engineer. He had a huge career, and then he went to Vietnam, and he couldn’t live with that, and he changed his life to try to stop it.

The two were driving together in San Francisco, and he was talking to her about what had happened to him, and in the book she writes: “He had every reason to suspect that he was under surveillance, and he was driving as if someone was trying to escape from the one who was chasing him. Prose admits of these moments with Russo that “there were several points where I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t.” On their first date, they stood at the edge of the Sutro Baths in Land’s End, which she calls a hole in the ground, and although she didn’t know this unstable man, she ignored the potential risks. “For me, a lot of the book is about being that age, what it’s like to be that age and how reckless in a way you are, and irresponsible in a way you don’t even know.

Russo comes alive in part because of memorable specificity, even if Prose doesn’t consider himself someone with a good memory. She says: “Once you start remembering things, other things come back to you. As I remembered him eating the smashed sausage with the blueberry pie in the cafeteria, it all started to come back. Anyway, the memory is so strange, but I could hear his voice. Plus, there are film clips of him, so I can hear the rhythm of his speech.

Russo isn’t the only appearance here: Prose is also haunted by her younger self. The younger prose she creates on the page is as vivid as the characters in her novels, Blue Angel has The vixen; she is curious, open-minded and searching, but also terribly uncertain, not yet in possession of her true north.

Prose reflects: “I think I’m probably more forgiving of my characters than I am of myself in writing this, you know? Because there were many moments where I thought, God, she was so stupid, and then I remembered it was me. So I had to recalibrate. Exposing the flawed behavior of his younger self didn’t scare him – Prose is composed of herself, unforgiving, while she speaks of the other, distant Prose. When Prose’s husband, artist Howie Michaels, who is her first reader, reviewed an early draft, he remarked that Prose should like herself more than she liked him.

Towards the end of the memoir, Russo experiences a horrible breakdown. In this crisis, Prose could not tolerate what was happening – her own “psychic survival seemed so fragile” – and fled. She said of the written account: “I could have lied, you know? I could have said I stood there, I helped him, I made sure he was in good hands because no matter what happened, he was my friend… Maybe he there was just a little hint of resentment towards the fact that he was there. the one who had always spoken. If one of her friends collapsed in public, she wouldn’t be “out the back door” the way she is today.

Prose writing practice evolved throughout the different stages of her life, but in 1974, despite having a book published and another in preparation, she did not consider herself accumulating material, much less for a memoir. Russo may have affected her later fiction, however – she identifies her predilection for writing rants “where the characters go crazy – like discussions and discussions and discussions and discussions and you only have an idea minimal of what they say.”

I wonder if, by absorbing San Francisco in 1974, it was write, in a way. Alluding to Muriel Spark Stroll with intention, in which a struggling writer learns that parts of her first novel are becoming reality, Prose responds: “It’s so mysterious because there’s a way in which the world gives you what you need.” » His favorite of his novels, Mr Monkey, came about because she took her granddaughter to an off-Broadway show — the costumes were falling apart, the lighting guy couldn’t find the characters, and her granddaughter asked, in an unexpected lull, if that interested him. She replied, “You bet.” She says: “I felt like I had written the novel just so I wouldn’t have lied to him about my interest in the world’s low-budget children’s musical. »

So is there a difference between working in memoirs and in fiction? The author acknowledges that she is unsure of the balance between imagination and observation. She’s currently finishing a novel with historical figures, characters who surprise her, and she says: “There’s a certain amount of things you can’t know about people. Their behavior is neither sensible nor moral. I think it came to me in a very direct and personal way with the memoir. I am not the hero of this moment. Still, she says, her granddaughters are now teenagers, and she notices things that make her more forgiving of herself, concluding that there are “things you have to do to be a person.”

As with his novels, Prose has moved beyond ruminations like “Am I saying too much?” Is it embarrassing? What a horrible (person) I was” trying to make correct sentences, finding a perfect word. His voice brightens. “There is no such thing. It’s pure happiness.”•

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Writer’s Room: Francine Prose

1974: A PERSONAL STORYBY FRANCISE PROSE