Interview with David Payne

Abstract

BETINA ENTZMINGER Bloomsburg University Interview with David Payne A NATIVE OF NORTH CAROLINA, DAVID PAYNE IS THE AUTHOR OF FIVE novels, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street (1984), set in a Chinese monastery and at the New York Stock Exchange; Early from the Dance (1989), Ruin Creek (1993), and Gravesend Light (2000), all set in the fictional town of Killdeer, North Carolina and in the Outer Banks; and Back to Wando Passo (2006), set on a South Carolina plantation during the Civil War and during the early twenty-first century. This last novel features a love triangle in the past, with plantation heir Harlan, his wife Addie, and his mixed-race half brother Jarry, that echoes a love triangle in the present, with Harlan’s descendant Claire, her bipolar husband Ransom, and their long time friend Marcel. I met with Mr. Payne on February 17, 2009 at his home in Hillsborough. I had asked him if I could talk with him about similarities between his novel Back to Wando Passo and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! We also discussed his new work-in-progress, a family memoir. Mr. Payne began by showing me a well-thumbed and annotated copy of Absalom, Absalom! He had recorded on the fly leaf the dates on which he had read the novel over the years. David Payne: This is my copy of the novel. This is the first time I read it—in ’74, when I was about nineteen—and then somewhere in the 90s. I read it three times there, quite closely, and took copious notes. However, I didn’t have a specific plan to rewrite Faulkner, as in I am going to rewrite or reconfigure Absalom, Absalom! in Back to Wando Passo. Five years after my last reading of Faulkner, when I started Wando Passo, I had this image of a black man and a white man in a moment of confrontation—the white man holds the black man at gunpoint, and whatever the issue is between them, it’s dire, it’s past talking. It’s as though somewhere inside me the computer had been working, and it spit out that image. And that was the foundational image that started me on the novel. Late in the composition process, sometime as I was approaching the murder at the very end of the book, I think it occurred to me, this is kind of like Charles Bon and Henry, but then I thought, yeah, 332 Betina Entzminger well so is Jarry like Charles? Is Harlan like Henry Sutpen? And the answer to both questions was, No, not very. It didn’t seem that big a deal, so I have to tell you, the whole parallel with Absalom, Absalom! was done unconsciously. Betina Entzminger: Unconsciously? That’s interesting, because a lot of parallels jumped out to me as I was reading it, for example, the incest. DP: It’s there. Absolutely, it’s there, there’s no question. And I think the allusion is there, it’s clearly there, I just— BE: You weren’t thinking of it as you were doing it. So you internalized the novel to some extent and then part of it came out as you were writing. DP: I’d like to smack myself on the head for not getting it, but all I can say is, you know, I didn’t. BE: One of the really interesting parallels that I see is how in Absalom, Absalom! there are Charles and Henry, and then there’s Quentin and Shreve in the present, and they’re haunted, they’re reliving the story similar to the way Ransom is kind of reliving the story of Addie and Jarry and Harlan. DP: Except of course Quentin and Shreve don’t act out the drama of the story, they ruminate on the past; in Wando Passo, Ransom repeats aspects of the past in his present life with Claire and Marcel. BE: One of the things that interests me with books that reconfigure some aspect of the literature of the past is the relationship of those books to the literature of the past. DP: It’s almost as though the ending of...