Interviewed by Christine Rice

After 16 years at the Paris Review, Elizabeth Gaffney is currently the editor at large for the literary magazine A Public Space. Her first novel, Metropolis, was published in 2006, her short stories have appeared in literary magazines such as The Virginia Quarterly Review and The North American Review, and she has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the Macdowell Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center.  She has also translated three books from German (The Arbogast Case, Invisible Woman, The Pollen Room).

Oh, and she teaches at The New School.

Her most recent novel, When the World Was Young, harnesses that deep well of writing experience to fully realize the chaotic times surrounding World War II. Gaffney employs weighty subjects (race, the atom bomb, war, suicide, disillusionment, love), manipulates time in interesting ways, and juggles character plots seamlessly to give her characters heft and history and blood.

CR:  That’s a plush resume but there’s something missing.  You’re a mom, too.  What would you say to writers who are also parents?

EG:  Make sure your kids see you reading and writing. It’s important they know you have a job! Also that reading and writing can be a job. But then get some serious time away from them, so you can concentrate. I have an amazing all-women’s writers’ space called Powderkeg that I belong to. It is big and dusty and furnished with beautiful old wooden desks and napping couches. My desk is a roll top! The place is my cathedral. I go there to worship and devote myself to the practice of literature (viz., read and write).

CR:  You’re a native New Yorker…Yankees or Mets?

EG:  Mets, of course! I am from Brooklyn! But I’m not too serious about it. I have been to one game — back in the days of Darrell Strawberry, I’m afraid, and they won. Let’s go Mets.

CR:  Darrell Strawberry led the Mets to the World Series in 1986.  We’re still waiting, here, on the Cubs.  So, yeah, let’s go Mets.

You didn’t simplify or ignore the question of race in this novel.  Loretta is a black woman who runs Gigi’s and Waldo’s house.  Ham is her son.  Loretta fiercely loves Ham and her employers’ daughter and granddaughter.  The ‘upstairs/downstairs’ relationships are a crucial part of the novel’s plot.  In “Metropolis,” your characters were Irish and German immigrants.  Can you comment on writing about characters who are ethnically and racially different from yourself?

EG:  I am really concerned with issues of social justice. In every era and place, different groups have born the brunt of society’s injustice in different ways. By including master and servant relationships and friendships that cross class and socioeconomic boundaries, I try to address that. I certainly don’t want any of my characters to be perfect saints, so all the people on all sides of these relationships have their flaws, their limitations, their humanity. I didn’t want them to be stereotypes either. I suppose I try to draw on my experience of actual people I’ve know, their voices and sayings. Loretta and Ham are (very loosely) drawn from two people I knew and loved dearly as a child, so they had a basis in reality. I couldn’t write a story as sad as the one that actually happened to the real Ham. He died in his twenties with a needle in his arm.

CR:  Place is incredibly important in both of your novels.  Right from the beginning of When the World Was Young, you beautifully establish its historical moment in time.  How did you capture the authentic feeling of mid-1940s Brooklyn and NYC as a whole?

EG:  I spent a lot of time reading about New York in that era, and also looking at photographs, many of which were in the collections of the Brooklyn Historical Society, where I had a fellowship to make work drawing on their collections. I looked at menus, maps, all kinds of documents, as well, of course, as newspapers of the time. The librarians and curators there were amazingly helpful. It’s also a big help that I live in Brooklyn, and the area I’m writing about is a historic district, so not that much has changed in terms of the way the buildings look. One of my biggest challenges was getting a clear vision of the grand old hotel that comes up in the book, the Hotel St. George. I looked at architects’ drawings of the interior, vintage advertising pamphlets and relied on posts to a Yahoo group that focuses on memories of the St. George, which once had a marble salt-water swimming pool with a mirrored and mosaic-lined atrium several stories tall. It was magnificent. I wish I could have seen it. There are now private apartments and a college dorm in most of the building and a multi-story health club built in the space the pool used to occupy.

CR:  How did you get the 1940’s dialect just right?

EG:  I don’t know if I did, but I’m thrilled if it sounded authentic. Basically, I just follow my ear, and try not to use anachronisms. I probably have all kinds of false ideas of what 1940s dialect should sound like, picked up from old movies and books, but I also believe that if it were too correct, it would probably sound sort of corny. What I ended up with is probably a blend of the way we speak now and what I’ve heard and read from that time. It was really hard with Metropolis, because of course there aren’t even any old movies. I had the hardest time keeping the word “okay” out of that book. It’s hard to write dialogue in the 21st century without using “okay.”

CR:  How important is research to your writing process?

EG:  It’s huge. It gives me so many ideas. Whenever I’m not sure what happens next, I do some research and inevitably come across some actual event that I can tie into my story, and that guides me.

CR:  I found the details of Wally’s inner life really fascinating and, having young daughters myself, spot-on.  The novel is written in third person but a good chunk of the beginning is seen through Wally’s childhood eyes and reveals her internal perceptions.  Accessing the internal perceptions of a child was a brave choice and crucial to establishing Wally’s character.  Did the novel always start that way?  Or did you come to see Wally as the central character as you got deeper into the work?

EG:  Thanks! I was a brooding girl myself, very much a watcher and a dreamer. The first scene I wrote was, oddly, Wally with her grandmother, bickering about not wanting to do needlepoint. It took me a while to get back to the V-J Day parade that I begin with. I always seem to start partway in and have to back up a little to get the right perspective on things. With “Metropolis,” the first thing I wrote was a scene about Frank Harris in a hiring office, looking for work. Only much later did I write the opening scene of the cityscape and his arrival and Beatrice pickpocketing by the harbor.

CR:  Mr. Niederman, a family friend who comes to live with Wally and her mother in Brooklyn, is a scientist working on the atom bomb.  What was one of the most interesting things you found while researching the atom bomb?

EG:  I was interested in the fact that there was a small Manhattan office of the Manhattan Project, though of course the really big stuff happened at Los Alamos. I didn’t want to tackle a whole book about the bomb, but just to make it a theme, and so Niederman is a very small cog in the Manhattan Project. The morality of ending the war with such violence is still so fraught today. It seems like a macrocosmic, geopolitical analogue to the decision of a person to end a troubled life by murder or suicide. It violates the golden rule. That is an issue in the book. The other thing I was most fascinated — and horrified — by is the story of the USS Indianapolis, which delivered the parts and uranium for the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. On it’s way back from that very mission, the Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank. Of the almost 1200 men on board, approximately 880 died, and about 580 of those died of drowning, exposure or shark attacks in the five days following the sinking of the ship. It took almost five days for the remaining men to be rescued! It’s horrible. In the book, Wally’s grandfather has polio and is unable to serve in the war, and then afterward he becomes obsessed with the Indianapolis.

CR:  Wally, Stella, and Waldo are the descendents of the two main characters in your first novel, Metropolis.  Did you have this rolling sense of future time when you wrote Metropolis?  Or did that come much later?

EG:  I figured that out part way into writing WWWY. It just sort of dawned on me one day that this was who they were, and then I had to make it work out, so I adjusted times and ages of characters slightly to fit. I was intrigued by the idea of such total assimilation and transformation — from lowlives to gentry — in the course of three generations. Once I realized it, I knew I would have to write a third book to bridge the gap. That’s what I’m working on now. It’s set in New York, again, of course, between 1908 and 1918, when the influenza pandemic occurs — and has tragic impact on the family. So it turns out this third book is actually set in wartime, but I will once again be looking at war from the perspective of the home front.

CR:  There’s something about the care you took developing Loretta’s and Ham’s characters that suggests we’ll be seeing more of them…yes?

EG:  I’m not sure yet if there’s going to be a sequel. I’m stuck on the prequel for the time being!

CR:  New Yorkers and Chicagoans are slightly obsessed by pizza.  What’s your favorite pie in New York?

EG:  Fascati’s in Brooklyn Heights. Plain. Best in the universe I am sure!

CR:  If we could be anywhere in the world — mountains, the top of an Egyptian pyramid, a corner bar in your neighborhood, etc. — where would we be conducting this interview?  And what would we be drinking?

EG: How about a glass of chardonnay on my back deck. You hardly know you’re in the city. You’re invited, anytime!

CR:  I’ll be there.

Favorite New York museum?

EG:  The Museum of Natural History — which plays a considerable role in Wally’s education in ants and insects in the book. I actually never studied bugs there, but I adore the place.

CR:  You weigh huge events (war, race, love, infidelity) against the lovely and painful details of childhood. For example, there’s a war going on in Europe, Wally has lost her brother, her father is absent, and her mother is…let’s say, distracted.  But her world is filled with these lovely details like ants, and comic books, and imagination.  I just really loved the contradictory nature of how small and manageable Wally’s difficult world became when she focused on her ant colonies.  Can you talk about the importance of pulling in close and stepping back as a novelist?  Or, how do you use these ‘details’ or this finely-tuned seeing to shift an entire scene?

EG:  I feel like we live in the moment, and the moment is all the small things that make up the fabric of our lives — most of the time. Food, pastimes, weather. It’s all real. It’s our daily existence. There are certain big events in all our lives that punctuate that fabric — some personal, some geopolitical, some both at once — but just as we couldn’t sustain a life that was all births and deaths and wars and shattered crockery, a book can’t sustain constant intensity. I suppose I write stories that are about as dramatic as I can bear. When I can’t bear it, I, look away, like my characters, down at the crumbs under the table.