- - - - Copyright 2003 Tin House
- - - - An Interview with Paul Collins By P. Genesius Durica Paul Collins's first book, Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (Picador, 2001), used a variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources to chronicle the lives of men and women whose visions much exceeded their abilities. Populated by, among others, a hollow-earth theorist, a fraudulent Formosan, a Shakespeare-crazed woman of letters, and artist who made millions with a panoramic painting of the Mississippi, Folly made the intriguing case that the obscure are as important to understanding the past as their better-remembered rivals. Collins's next book was a memoir, Sixpence House (Bloomsbury, 2003), which depicts a year spent in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, with its "1,500 inhabitants...and forty bookstores, antiquarian bookstores, no less." Sixpence is a memoir as a meditation on books and their relationship to decay and loss, weaving together personal narrative and literary arcana, often to bewildering effect. "Books are the cellars of civilization," writes Collins in Sixpence; "when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity." More ignored than hidden away, many old and obscure books continue to endure in university and municipal libraries, which is why Collins is at the Multnomah County Branch near his home in Portland, Oregon. He patiently shifts through a volume of the British journal Notes and Queries, which began publishing in 1849 and continues to the present. The journal consists of readers' questions, about everything from folk remedies—"Octopus, Venus's Ears, and Welk" is the title of one article—and curiosities of literature to familial connections, along with readers' detailed replies. Of the many bits of arcana in Notes & Queries, the unanswered questions interest Collins most. If provocative, they may end up serving as a starting point for additional research and, later, an article for McSweeney's or Cabinet. At the moment, he is satisfied with jotting down page numbers on a folded library pamphlet he holds like a racing form. He is speculating that hidden amid articles on heart burial, human fat used as medicine, coffin-shaped chapels, and the tallest flagpole in the British Empire (in Kew Gardens, fashioned from a tree donated by a Mr. Stump of Vancouver, B.C.) lurks a paragraph, a line, a vague description or reminiscence of value. This afternoon Collins uncovers a page in Notes & Queries significant to the forthcoming Not Even Wrong (Bloomsbury, out this April). Collins's third book deals with the diagnosis and treatment of his three-year-old son's autism, and the history of the disorder, not properly described until the 1940s. The article in Notes & Queries concerns Peter the Wild Boy, one of several so-called "feral children" who gained a certain amount of notoriety in the eighteenth century. Abandoned as infants, these children survived by instinct in remote locales, often for years, before being rehabilitated to civilized society. These feral children, Collins believes, were autistic. The Multnomah County Branch houses 145 volumes of Notes & Queries, amounting to approximately 3,480 issues and roughly 1,914,000 pages. An admitted bibliophile and antiquarian, Collins is in the process of reading the entire run. P. GENESIUS DURICA: When confronted by such a large number of possible narratives, how do you begin to make sense of them? Are you ever overwhelmed? PAUL COLLINS: I don't get too overwhelmed by the amount of material. I've gotten good at deciding what to use and what not to use. There's no magic formula for that—I think it just came with experience. What I do spend a great deal of time pondering is form: what sequence to put my narrative in, where to introduce things, where to hold back, etc. This might be because my primary training as a writer was as a novelist, so I always have those things in mind. And I often find form and narrative tension to be a weakness in nonfiction writing. I'm always thinking about the narrative. A lot of the time when I'm walking around my neighborhood on my way to the supermarket or something, I'm going over different narrative permutations in my head, like working a Rubik's Cube. PGD: As you're quick to point out, everything has a precedent. What were some of the structural and stylistic predecessors of Banvard's Folly? PC: The direct influences on Banvard's Folly are the authors listed in the dedication. Especially Van Wyck Brooks, who contextualized his literary histories by spending a great deal of time on "second-tier" or now-forgotten writers. Dave Eggers actually influenced my approach to memoir in Sixpence House quite a bit, though not in ways that would be obvious to the reader—mainly as goad, really. The fact that he set the stylistic bar so high with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius forced me to innovate and not lazily adopt a standard approach. The narrative tone of Sixpence owes something to Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat), plus the writers that I list in the book's acknowledgements page. PGD: Any other contemporary writers, apart from Eggers? PC: There are a couple of current authors whose works haven't influenced me per se, but who I feel a certain kinship to...mainly Lawrence Weschler and the nonfiction work of Nicholson Baker. When I was young—junior high, high school—I was very into John McPhee and Kurt Vonnegut. PGD: These people provided a sort of stylistic basis for Banvard, but the real appeal rests with the subjects, their devastating failures and subsequent slides into obscurity. What led you to think these lives were worth a book? PC: There are really several possible starting points for Banvard's Folly. One, I was exposed to old books at a very early age. Two, at William and Mary, I had a work-study job for an American Studies professor where he wanted me to Xerox the table of contents of every nineteenth-century issue of Harper's, the Atlantic, and the Southern Literary Messenger. I was a crappy worker, frankly, because instead of copying I started reading the magazines. And I was astonished by how few of the names in them I recognized—me, an English major who had prided himself on specializing in nineteenth-century lit. I felt like I'd been defrauded by my instructors. And that's when I realized that to get a real sense of the past, you have to read what they were reading—namely, the actual newspapers and magazines, on paper. That was a major turning point for me. - - - -
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