The World Below (38 page)

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

1. Soon after Catherine arrives in Vermont, a real estate agent approaches her about showing the house to prospective buyers. The realtor compliments her on the house and adds that she is also enamored of the house’s “story”—“in the family for generations, both your parents living here into their old age, and so forth.” Catherine recoils. “The truth was I didn’t want to think of any of us that way—my grandparents, my mother, me. Or to have our life here used as a selling point—all that pain and sorrow and joy—to make the house itself more appealing. We weren’t the house’s
   story
   , none of us.” Catherine is objecting, in part, to the fact that the story is more complicated than the realtor could possibly know—more complicated than any of them could possibly know, in fact. What does she mean? How is this notion advanced throughout the novel?
   
2. Miller writes that as Dr. Holbrooke examined nineteen-year-old Georgia he was “already beginning to think in terms of rescue.” Yet in the same chapter he reflects on the arbitrariness of fate—of death in particular—and of the bewildering weight of his power in relation to both. How do you think Dr. Holbrooke squares his discomfort with his decision to have Georgia sent to the san? How do you think the author views his actions?
   
3. Catherine speaks of rescue, too, in the scene in which she first meets Joe. “What shall I say of Joe? That I felt rescued by him from something I hadn’t been conscious of needing rescue from? That I trusted him? Both were true. I never considered that I might be rescuing him.” How does this differ from Dr. Holbrooke’s rescue of Georgia? To what extent are all relationships, especially romantic ones, a form of rescue?
   
4. As young women, both Cath and Georgia felt a deep sense of shame; both of them, early on, came to believe that they were failures. Why? Discuss the parallels in their lives.
   
5. Shortly after receiving the news that her father is to be remarried, Georgia cuts her hair. Is this transformation an act of empowerment or of self-punishment? “She unpinned her hair and let it down—
   your crowning glory
   her mother had called it—and watched as the long bolts of it slipped and whispered to the floor.” What is Georgia rejecting? What is she embracing?
   
6. In
   chapter eight
   , Catherine invites Samuel Eliasson back to her house, and they have a conversation about the past. Eliasson, a historian, says that he views himself as an anthropologist, of sorts; he compares the past to “another culture, another country.” What does he mean? And how is this notion of the past reflected in the novel as a whole?
   
7. In this same conversation, Samuel describes his wife’s religious devotion as “the central invisible fact of her life.” He continues, “You could write her life’s story without including it if you didn’t know specifically about it, it was simply underneath everything.” How does this idea of a “central invisible fact” come into play elsewhere in the novel? What is the central invisible fact of Georgia’s life? Of Dr. Holbrooke’s? Of Catherine’s? What is the central invisible fact of your own?
   
8. The novel takes its name from the image of a town submerged beneath the surface of a lake. Catherine glimpses this world one day while fishing on the lake with her grandfather: “I looked down again. It came and went under the moving water, the sense of what was there. There were long moments when I couldn’t quite get it, when it seemed I must have imagined it. But then there it was again, sad and mysterious. Grand, somehow. Grand because it was gone forever but still visible, still imaginable, below us.” Discuss this image in relation to the novel’s themes. How has the author woven it into the novel’s narrative and the narrative of its individual characters? What is the “World Below”?
   
9. Catherine expresses a desire to begin life anew at various points throughout the novel—when she arrives with her young children on her grandparents’ doorstep, after separating from her first husband; when she arrives in Vermont to make a decision about whether to sell the house or stay on; when, as a teenager, she is offered the chance to live with Rue in Paris for a summer. Each of these moments offers her, or seems to offer her, the possibility of inventing a new self. Is this kind of self-invention possible? Discuss the author’s views on identity
   
10. Discuss the question above in relation to Georgia’s life. Look, in particular, at Georgia’s thoughts after leaving the san, and at her first conversation with Dr. Holbrooke at her father’s wedding. To what extent is it possible for other people to act as a bridge between our past and future selves?
    
11. In
    chapter eleven
    , Georgia and Dr. Holbrooke have a heated argument in which it unfolds that their marriage has been built on a misunderstanding. Can true love ever emerge out of a falsehood, even an accidental one? How does the author shape our perception of their marriage through the course of the book?
    
12. During Georgia’s argument with Dr. Holbrooke it is also revealed that Georgia did not have TB at the time she was sent to the san, and that Dr. Holbrooke misled her qbout the condition of her lungs. Dr. Holbrooke claims that he was justified in lying to her because her time at the san was beneficial—she rested, she gained strength, she was relieved of the daily burdens of caring for her family. “But it changed my
    life
    !” Georgia cries in response. What is your view of Dr. Holbrooke’s decision to have her sent away? Was this an act of mercy, or a misuse of power, or both? Do we have the right to change one another’s lives?