authors on authors
Laurel Zuckerman talks with Christopher Vanier about his memoir Caribbean Chemistry: Tales from St Kitts
LZ : As a teenager in the Caribbean, you won an essay contest on Abraham Lincoln for which the prize was an invitation to Washington DC. A science nerd with no particular interest in racial politics, you found yourself in travelling the USA at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. As a memoirist what were the challenges you faced writing about this episode decades later.
CV : The challenge was that the protagonist (my teenaged self) was not very aware, or critical, of his Caribbean social and racial environment. He had little to compare it with, and even when he visited the USA he remained quite naive. He knew nothing of Martin Luther King and probably assimilated the Ku Klux Klan with Tolkein's orcs. To deal with this lack of sophistication and yet inform the reader, the writer has to use other viewpoints, closer to his own, but without confusing the reader, who must know when the protagonist is thinking something and when a comment comes straight from the current writer. I use multiple personas to deal with this problem, and on the positive side the tension between the writer's views and the young protagonist's views can be stimulating. It takes a lot of care in the writing for the change of personas to be seamless. Today, it is clear that the USIA was "wise" and somewhat manipulative with me in 1959, only showing me the positive aspects of US internal race relations. Projecting a positive image of the USA via Lincoln was part of a massive diplomatic effort in the Cold War to keep places like the Caribbean friendly. At the time, my protagonist was completely unaware of this.
LZ: One of the particular pleasures of Caribbean Chemistry is your precise, analytical approach to the intense emotions and sensations of childhood. Has a passion for science made you a better writer?
CV : On the whole, yes. A quest for truth, an attention to detail, and a willingness to analyse causes of events are all part of a scientific outlook. But there is a negative side. Many scientists don't like over-colourful images, they repeat themselves too often, and they systematically hedge their bets. A scientist might say, "The man was approximately five feet tall", because he's not sure whether the "true" height is one or two inches either way. In fiction, or in a memoir intended as narrative, it is better to remove the uncertainty (cut the word approximately) unless this is vital to the story. So there is a shift in language - precision for it's own sake has much less value than in a research paper. Doubt is still very important, but it moves to another level.
LZ: You claim not to understand poetry (or poets), yet your writing has a quiet lyrical quality to it. Are you secretly one of them?
CV: Well, English Literature was my best subject at university entrance (A-levels) so clearly I relished Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth at that age. A classical taste. I even wrote poetry myself (a confession). But it's true that modern or post-modern attempts at poetry annoy me. I certainly don't understand most of it. My feeling is that there is quite sufficient poetry in prose. Looking at symmetry and dissymmetry on a page of good prose, noticing the resonance of certain words, is quite good enough for me.
LZ : Caribbean Chemistry is a book about growing up in St Kitts and Antigua which you wrote while living in France. Do you see yourself as an expatriate writer? A British writer? A French writer? Or simply a memoirist? Do these distinction have any meaning at all? What made you write this book?
CV: A memoirist, if anything. I don't think the place you write from is very significant. Many writers feel more at home when at a distance from their subject. I hold a British passport and a St. Kitts passport but have worked and lived in France longer than anyplace else. I got my doctoral degree from the USA and, particularly in the area of "creative non-fiction", I have enormous affinity with America. That seems to make me a citizen of the world, or at least of Europe. The motivation for writing this book has nothing to do with countries and nationality, though. It's mainly the fulfilment of a boyhood dream to write for others something as enjoyable as all the books that have pleased me. Secondarily, the emphasis on memoir has allowed me to place my past in perspective. We go through life with a set of temporary loans - mind, body, and loved ones - assets that disappear all too quickly. A good memoir is a way of preserving some of our thoughts for future generations.
LZ: You worked for years with a writers’ group in Paris. How did this affect your writing—and you?
CV: Writer's groups and workshops are very useful to a developing writer. By himself, a writer is closeted in his limited egoisms; he needs feedback on style and content to develop. But workshops can be confusing when others want you to write their story and not yours. You have to keep control of your project. There is other positive fallout: workshops help to keep you to a schedule, and through workshops over an eight-year period, I have made some of my best friends.
LZ: Caribbean Chemistry was discovered by its publisher thanks to a literary contest. What are the advantages and disadvantages of contests? How can writers benefit from them?
CV: Contests are a valuable refinement if a writer is really serious about being published. When workshops get too supportive (ie more and more wine and less hard knocks) there's no way to measure the objective value of one's work. Entering a big competition and finding out that you are not even placed in a "long list" of the first hundred candidate stories is quite sobering. Competitions make you re-edit your work seriously, which is always a good thing. Many of them give you valuable critiques for a small extra entrance fee. It's an opportunity to sample the market, see what the competition is like, and learn more about the impact your work makes. I discovered, for instance, that certain of my memoir chapters could compete effectively with stories written as pure fiction - the judges couldn't tell the difference , or didn't care. And finally, a competition can lead to publication of a story or of a whole book.
LZ : All the characters in Caribbean Chemistry are real. Do you anticipate any lawsuits?
CV: Lawsuits are unlikely, but not impossible. This is another steep learning curve that the memoir writer has to climb. One shouldn't let the early writing be inhibited by threats until it is done, but when a book is in its final stages the possibility of lawsuits must be studied. British law on libel and invasion of privacy is currently so much in favour of the plaintiff that publishers oblige their authors to obtain written consent to publish from all the characters who appear in the book. I had mentioned 108 names. Fortunately, many of the name owners were deceased! A few of the living obliged me to change their names or even to erase their actions from my book. The right to free speech is weaker in the UK than in the USA, and in my view this seriously limits a writer's possibilities of telling the truth about politicians and important public figures. I hope this will change. From where I sit, a memoir writer has an obligation to be fair to all parties, but he doesn't have to like them, nor to make them look better than they were, nor to cover up their misdeeds. The stakes are the same as for journalists and historians.
LZ: In addition to memoir, you also write science fiction. Is there a link between the two genres?
CV: Superficially, none. But one of my mentors once told me that if I liked SF so much then that should influence my memoir stories. Perhaps there is an unbridled effect in the dreams and fantasies of my protagonist. Going in the other direction, I think that a memoir writer should be able to create quite credible SF. I do have some unfinished projects with stories about the future. But my addiction to memoir means that the "future of the future" is uncertain.
