We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with Orange Prize recipient Téa Obreht (The Tiger’s Wife, The Morningside) about Daphne du Maurier’s indulgence in the uncanny, and with New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young (Jelly Roll: a blues, Night Watch) about the “mercurial but reliable” poems of Lucille Clifton.
Téa Obreht on Daphne du Maurier
It seems like Daphne du Maurier’s books are better known than her name. Do you feel that way?
She’s one of those authors who, when you read her now, makes you go, How wasn't this person taken more seriously in her time? Her level of skill and of understanding what the reader needs is so high and so intense, and there's so much to learn from. In her time, she was thought of as this kind of frivolous, romantic writer for women. I've been thinking a lot about whom we teach—the canon of literary fiction—and feeling buoyed by the fact that we've opened this up a lot more to genre, to the uncanny, to fantasy, speculative fiction, to mystery, and to all the great masters from what was previously corralled as “not serious fiction” by God knows whom.
She was exceptionally prolific, publishing some 20 novels along with many story collections and nonfiction works. Where should someone start?
I would start with her short stories, just to see the gulf between something like “The Birds” or “Don't Look Now” or “Not After Midnight” and Rebecca. There's a progression from her short stories to her novels that signals a greater and greater understanding of how the world of a fiction should cohere. And her stories are bonkers.
Alfred Hitchcock adapted several of her stories. Why do you think her work was so appealing to him?
Something that we find in Hitchcock is the feeling of the supernatural even when there's not something supernatural going on, right? The plot is uncanny, or there are elements of the unexplained and the unexplainable. The plot of du Maurier’s “The Birds” is quite different from the Hitchcock film, but both have the same feeling of the unexplained and an increasing intensity of danger. In that way, the two were a perfect pairing.
What do you think of her work on a page level?
I love that she takes her time. Especially in the novels, she really indulges—sometimes overindulges—in building the mood. But she recognizes that mood has to be consistent throughout, and that the feeling of strangeness has to escalate. Her dialogue is also fantastic. It really sizzles. And I love her connection with place: she lived in and wrote about Cornwall her whole life, and I think that her preoccupation with its houses, and the layers of life within a house—the haunting of a house by the life that's lived in it—is something that really appeals to me.
What do you think that other writers can learn from her?
Two main things. One is to indulge an impulse for the uncanny. A lot of her short stories, especially, rely on a character following clues that may or may not be clues into situations that grow increasingly bizarre, and what they're actually following is their own assumptions into deeper and deeper darkness. The search for knowledge, especially when it's colored by the character's own persona, is still plot, and its consequences are still very intense.
The other thing is to leave room for ambiguity, which is related. There's a trend right now—or maybe there's always been a trend—towards absolute and sometimes damaging transparency in fiction. Everything has to be explicitly laid out, and very little is left unsaid. I think du Maurier is one of the queens of the unsaid. I think she knew that even at the end of a narrative, the things that remain unspoken or unknown or unresolved are just as, if not more powerful than the things that are resolved. That drives me crazy as a reader, but it's also the thing that leaves me wondering about the book. Denying the reader comfort, I think, is really important.
Kevin Young on Lucille Clifton
I hadn’t read Lucille Clifton since college and it was really great to look back at her work.
There's no one better than Lucille. She’s such a terrific writer, and a writer of such breadth. She was able, in really short poems, to convey an epic scale. Right after she died, I was asked to do her collected poems by her family, and the thing that troubled me was whether or not to do a selected. And we really felt, in the end, that we needed to represent the whole of her work. Having it collected—it's quite long—underlined her practice of making sense of the world through little parts, these lyric moments that add up to something major.
She started out in theater before moving into poetry. Do you think you can see that in her work?
She is interested in voices. The work isn't purely autobiographical. In fact, I think she’s in a tradition alongside writers like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, who were poets who wrote about the city and place, and were interested in capturing the community. Lucille was interested in herself, always a lowercase “i,” but she was also interested in this broader “self” of community. And the later books reflect that, like Book of Light or Quilting, which were really important. Or Blessing the Boats; that's her early selected which won the National Book Award.
I was struck by how “Wishes for Sons” is kind of grimly humorous.
It's hilarious. The first line is, “I wish them cramps.” I've taught that poem a million times. It exemplifies her humor, because it's a way of trying to get people to think about these everyday things that, in this poem, women deal with and consider, and that men are often oblivious to. And that's expressed in the last lines, which are, “Let them think they've accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.”
What do you think of her on a line level?
She has these shorter lines, though not always short, and certainly short poems. I think there's only one or two that are over a page. But she often wrote in sequence, and one of my favorite sequences of hers is Some Jesus, which are these reimaginings of biblical tales through an African American spiritual lens. They're just so incredible. It really made a huge impression on me to learn that you could take something sacred and almost make it your own, make it everyday.
All to say, at the line, she's tremendous, but can seem kind of casual. But it's all very thought out. One of her other terrific ones is the fox poems, where she was visited by a fox when she was undergoing treatment, I believe for cancer. This fox becomes like a totemic figure, but also a poet, in a way, and an artist: mercurial but reliable. And I think that quality is in her work.
These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
