Bolling:

As you think back from your most recent work, Meditations On An Empty Tomb, to A Glass Rose and such intervening novels as The Barbarians At The Gate, On A Dark Night, and the others, do you sense some common pattern or unifying perspective which makes the writings a part of a whole? I'm aware of common thematic concerns but would like your response to this.

Bankowsky:

All of my books, from A Glass Rose through Meditations, are parts of one large work. I wish it were otherwise. I suspect that readers hesitate to buy books that are parts of larger works whose earlier volumes they haven't read, even when each volume proposes, explores, and resolves an action independently of the other works in the series, as mine do. But I don't seem to have a choice.

After finishing After Pentecost, I discovered that its characters, as well as characters from the earlier Glass Rose, refused to lie still. On A Dark Night was the result. After that book and some intense reading in Jung and Neumann, I convinced myself (perhaps presumptuously) that the crosses and circles and triangles I had naively constructed in my notebooks to help work out my stories were mandalas, and that my characters were aspects not only of my own psyche but perhaps of the collective psyche as well, accounting for what Lask called my "ability to endow the most naturalistic of characters with mythical and heroic lineaments." Maybe the demands my characters were making on me were so very irresistible not because I was the obsessive, compulsive, infantile neurotic Freud would have us believe all artists are, but because I happened to inherit a more insistent unconscious impulse to psychic order than the average neurotic - which Jung tells us is the curse of the artist.

Anyway, as pretentious as all this sounds, it was nevertheless the rationale I gave myself for writing The Pale Criminals, the final volume (I naively believed) in the Rose tetralogy. And with The Barbarians At The Gate, I deliberately turned away from the old characters and techniques. However, before I was halfway through the first draft, I knew that the twelve year old prodigy I'd left playing the organ in the middle of a Mexican desert at the close of Criminals, would turn up at the Uniat Monastery of St. Procula in eastern Poland in 1972, and that Barbarians was as much a part of the whole as any of my other books. And with Meditations, my Rose tetralogy suddenly bloomed into a: hexad and now threatens to become a, heptad and perhaps even an octad.

Bolling:

The idea of form in longer fiction is very exciting and probably gives insight into a given writer's special way or writing and into his vision of his work. Could you think back and comment on how you thought of the form of The Pale Criminals? That is, to what extent did you begin with a clear idea and to what extent, did the writing itself create an evolutionary process in your mind and feelings?

Bankowsky:

I didn't at all begin with a clear idea of what I wanted to do in Criminals. As you suggest, the writing itself set up an evolutionary process in my mind and feelings. As I said earlier, Criminals was a response to the discovery of my mandala-making. Geldstucker's Ascension altarpiece is a mandala that unites all the four books of  the Rose tetralogy. Each section of Criminals - Fortune, Freedom, and Fate - is devoted to one character out of each of the three earlier books: Johnny (After Pentecost), Geldstucker (Dark Night), and Wadzio (Glass Rose). They are represented in Geldstucker's altarpiece by three of the triangles that make up the universe revolving in the circle of time revolving in the triangle of eternity.

The fourth triangle is The Pale Criminals, or the recalcitrant fourth. So, providence is presented not only as the triangulation of  Fate, Fortune, and Freedom, but also as the recalcitrant fourth, that triangulation viewed not as dance but as dirge--the view of secular realism, a sort of atheistic, existential, predominantly pessimistic view of experience personified in the deaf twelve-year-old prodigy who expresses his Nietzschean viewpoint through the music of Richard Strauss, the Also Sprach, the Don Juan, and Tot Und Verklarung, and the Salome as opposed to Brother Roman Novak's more optimistic Religious Realistic view of Providence as expressed in the epigraphs out of Scripture which are juxtaposed against the Strauss librettos, etc. at the beginning of each section. The various panels of the altarpiece depict scenes out of my four books in biblical- contemporary motifs.

Bolling:

I've found The Barbarians At The Gates to be especially powerful. Perhaps in part this has to do with the subject matter, but I think there's more to it than that. Something in the style, too. I sense some interesting movement, some change, from A Glass Rose to Barbarians. Klaus, Claudia, and especially Christian - these figures and some of the others emerge strongly and well and at the same time I feel a stylistic ease which enhances the action. Style, action, and theme (a better word seems to be "significance") work together very effectively. Did you, then, have any special feelings or thoughts when writing Barbarians? Do you see it in a light different from the earlier books for example?

Bankowsky:

Well, I deliberately turned away from my old characters in Barbarians. And though I retained the habit of seeing experience in mythical and Scriptural terms (The book was to be subtitled The Acts of Pilate, but I figured the epigraph, which is Pilate's words, would be enough to make the reader realize that the book was a modern Passion.), I abandoned the multiple- point-of-view techniques I'd used in my first four books, trying for the first time to tell the story from a single point of view.

Also, I was very interested in film at the time (Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, etc.) and  deliberately tried to be more visual and less interior than I had been previously. I must have succeeded in some degree,  for Roman Polanski, Bertoluci, David Lean and others read the manuscript. Unfortunately, none of them bought, but not since A Glass Rose had any of my books even gotten in the door. I've always wondered, however, what Barbarians might have been if I'd used multiple points of view instead of limiting it to Christian's. Even though that was my most successful book commercially, I don't think a single point of view is the best technique for telling the kind of story I need to tell. Anyway, in Meditations I've returned to multiple views, for better or worse.

Bolling:

You studied at both Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and have taught creative writing for a number of years now. What do you think about the relationship between formal study - say of both literature and the writers' workshop kind of thing - and creativity? What can such study and the academic setting do for the serious writer, if anything?

Bankowsky:

I found working with Robert Penn Warren and Charles Fenton at Yale and with Vernon Loggins at Columbia, and with Paul Engle, Donald Justice, and Vance Bourjailly at Iowa very stimulating. I can never repay them for all they did for me, not only in the way of inspiration, guidance, and encouragement, but in providing jobs and grants and good reviews to help me support my family and my writing habit. I try to keep them before me when I deal with my own students.

However, I learned as much about writing from reading their works as I did in their workshops and remind my own students that the best way to learn to write is to read those who do it best, and that one or two or at most three classes of the workshop type are okay, but that there's nothing more valuable than literature courses for a writer save perhaps voracious reading habits and a disposition toward ascetic discipline. As for experiences to write about, any writer with imagination has had enough by the time he's twenty to fill volumes, even if he'd spent most of his time in a cork-lined room.

As for what the academic atmosphere can do for a writer, it can provide him both as a student and a professor (provided he can turn his back on campus politics) with plenty of time to write and an honorable (though ascetic) living so that he may write what he needs to write and not what the marketplace dictates, in an atmosphere of lively, exciting young people full of all sorts of the most marvelous often delightfully harebrained ideas and interests. I can't imagine trading teaching for any other job in the world. Where else could I actually get paid to read Shakespeare and Melville and Faulkner?

Bolling:

What about your own sources and the influences on you? Can you find specific inspirations and sources in your background such that you feel their deep influence?

Bankowsky:

I've already mentioned the influence of Robert Penn Warren and the rest. Faulkner and Dostoevsky are obvious germinal influences, mainly for their presentations of multiple points of view in their works (what Bahktln calls polyphony), their marvelous inability to present any single point of view without immediately presenting alternative, often completely contradictory
points of view as  well. I mean their refusal to simplify, to allow their own personal beliefs as  men, to get in the way of their dedication to inclusiveness as artists. It is as much a mistake to suggest that Faulkner presents a Christian view of the cosmos as it is to say that Dostoevsky does. They may be Christians themselves {Dostoevsky perhaps of the molt reactionary sort judging from the Diary), but as artists they call into question all Christian claims to an exclusive parochial solution to the riddle of the cosmos, no less than they do any other parochial claims - materialistic, idealistic, existential, or whatever. That's what I'm after. I'm a fallen-away Uniat Catholic, but my books are catholic with a lower-case "c." Faulkner's oxymoronic techniques, like Dostoevsky's polyphony, are not evidence of a lack of a unified vision of experience, but rather of an artistic vision that goes far beyond all merely rational. systematic, pathetically limited definitions of unity.

Bolling:

How would you  characterize your novels as far as literary labels and movements go? I see them as clearly "realistic" in one sense and yet they surely go beyond this to a recognition of the spiritual as a reality for man. Religious values and a literary realism/ naturalism somehow work together in the novels.

Bankowsky:

My books are definitely realistic in one sense. Up to The Pale Criminals, I think my books tended to assert the views of Religious Realism against what I saw then (and still do) as the extremely short-sighted views of  materialistic and idealistic romanticism. (Naturalism/materialism and Idealism seem to be opposite sides of the same Romantic coin.) In Criminals and Barbarians, however,  I began to consider an alternative, more secular realistic view.  And in Meditations I began to envision still another alternative - an all inclusive view which somehow resolves what I see as the six mutually exclusive ways of looking at experience - a seventh way (see Brother Rose's "Tentative Notes" in Meditations on an Empty Tomb).

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