About Rosellen Brown: A Profile

Rosellen Brown is full of contradictions. She appears friendly and voluble, and admits she loves to perform in front of an audience, but she considers herself shy, and claims she is crippled with discomfort at parties. About writing novels, she says, "I have to struggle with my almost total inability to tell a story," although in
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Dorris -- after commending its literary merit -- called her last book, the critically lauded and best-selling
Before and After, "an unabashed, read-until-dawn page turner." After publishing four novels, two collections of stories and essays, and two volumes of poetry, with another forthcoming, Brown still wishes she had become a musician, able to deliver a "crystallized feeling that connects on a visceral level," complaining, "I get tired of trying to be smart." And Brown, a New Yorker-turned-New Englander, a pure-bred Yankee, somehow became an avid Houston Rockets fan, faithfully following the perennial chokers over twelve years until finally, with Brown in the stands at the Summit, the Rockets beat the Knicks to clinch the NBA Championship this summer.

But these sorts of discrepancies of character are what interest Brown about people, and she has made it her life's work to explore the complexities of the human heart, the intricate and unpredictable ways that ordinary women and men react to circumstances of fate. "There's no single truth," she says, and would never presume to offer one. "I take very seriously the idea that novelists raise questions and don't necessarily answer them." Rather, she only attempts to provide a measure of comprehension for her characters' actions, whether such insights are sympathetic or not. "Novels are where we learn what it feels like to be someone else, where we learn to be patient with ways of looking at things that are not our own."

Much of this attitude comes from Brown's peripatetic childhood. She was born in Philadelphia in 1939, but only spent ten weeks there. As her father pursued jobs in textile sales, her family relocated to various cities in Pennsylvania and New York and California, and Brown was profoundly affected by the rootless upbringing: "It's always been a kind of obsession in my writing that I haven't felt like I belonged anywhere."

To this day, she is convinced that if she had not moved so much, she would not have started writing at all. In 1948, she arrived in Los Angeles, and all summer, she laboriously made new friends. But by chance, because of an arbitrary zone line, she ended up going to a different school from them. "I was very lonely and unhappy," she recalls. "I started writing really as an attempt to keep myself company." During playground recesses, she began jotting poems and stories in a notebook, and arrogantly announced at the age of nine that she was going to be a writer (one of her first efforts was a mystery story called "Murder Stalks at Midnight").

Her parents encouraged her. They weren't educated, did not even go to high school, but they were liberal-minded and had vague intellectual aspirations. They kept a bookcase of great books called "the five-foot shelf," and Brown remembers reading Turgenev and Dostoevsky at an early age. Exhausting that resource, she pled for her adult library card. The librarians were reluctant, though, insisting she hadn't taken full advantage of the children's section. "I used to take home ten books a week, or however many I could fit in my bike basket, read them all, and bring them back. I had to convince them that I had read every goddamned book about a girl who opens a tearoom in the summer and finds her career and also her love."

Brown spent her high school years in Queens and concentrated for a time on journalism, driven by a demanding and attentive  teacher. "This sounds like Colette or something," she laughs, "but he used to lock me up in the newspaper room to finish my pieces. I wrote very flowery essays about individualism and apathy for a column called 'Vanity Fair.' They were downright Emersonian in their moral thrust."

She won a New York state scholarship to Barnard College, where she took three poetry workshops with Robert Pack, who had a tremendous influence on her, teaching her the fruits of revision. She soon became the star of the college literary community, editing the literary magazine and publishing a sestina in
Poetry when she was twenty. Confident, a little brash, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Brandeis University, and was promptly humbled by a literature professor who regularly reduced students to tears. "He felt that we had all learned a lot of romantic mush in college and he wanted to undo all that and make us scholars," Brown says somewhat bitterly. "There were a lot of students who wanted to write, and one by one, we bailed out."

After she received her master's, she left school, married her boyfriend, Marvin Hoffman, and moved to San Francisco. Brown credits her husband for being a vital source of support, inspiring her to keep writing, then and now. "It's not coincidental, I think, that part of his first attraction to me was that I was an aspiring writer. In fact, our first conversation on the telephone had to do with
The Kenyon Review and Norman Mailer. He kept me from going through some of those really guilty moments that women have when they put their kids in day care centers or get baby-sitting help. He worked, this was my work, and God knows, it got no smaller shred of attention than his." A testament to their equal partnership was their decision to go to Tougaloo College in 1964, immediately after Hoffman received his doctorate in clinical psychology. Brown was invited by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to teach at the black college, which was ten miles outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Since Tougaloo happened to have an opening in psychology as well, Brown and Hoffman accepted, largely -- although apprehensively -- for political reasons. "We didn't conceive of ourselves in any heroic terms," she concedes, "and we weren't quite ready to see ourselves as activists and demonstrate, because frankly we were scared, but we went there thinking that we could do our bit for civil rights at a very hot time." It turned out
that the presence of whites on campus was reason enough for vilification by the community, which referred to Tougaloo as Cancer College. Riding in integrated cars or mailing anti-Vietnam War letters was even more provocative. "It didn't take too much to get sugar put in your gas tank," Brown says.

The experience, as expected, forever changed them, and gave Brown the subject matter for several of her books, including her first collection of poetry,
Some Deaths in the Delta, which was published in 1970. The poems contrast the racism and violence of the South with the despair of urban life in Brooklyn, where Brown lived for three years after Mississippi. Several years passed before she turned to fiction. "I felt at the time that my talents could be best served by dealing purely with words, not narratives. It was only when I began to realize that I wanted to write about other people besides myself, and to look outward rather than inward, that I started thinking I needed to write stories." She released a collection of fourteen stories,
Street Games, in 1974, depicting the everyday lives of the residents on a single block in Brooklyn and their confrontations with class, sex, and race.

From that point on, as Brown and her husband raised their two daughters in New Hampshire, a deeper, more abstract, and consistent theme emerged in her fiction: the tension between public and private duties, the tugs of familial and marital responsibilities in the face of ideological and personal claims. In
The Autobiography of My Mother, Brown's first novel, Gerda Stein, a celebrated civil rights attorney in Manhattan, is visited after an eight-year absence by her daughter, Renata, a former Haight-Ashbury hippie who has had a baby out of wedlock; Gerda and Renata, criticizing the hypocrisy of each other's generation, struggle over the custody of the child. In
Cora Fry, Brown's favorite of all her books, a woman narrates a cycle of eighty-four poems; she yearns for freedom from her provincial life as a rural New Hampshire housewife, but feels just as trapped by the prospect of escape. In
Tender Mercies, her second novel, Dan Courser accidentally steers a boat over his swimming wife, Laura, paralyzing her, and the family is tested by enormous wells of blame and guilt during her rehabilitation. In
Civil Wars, Teddy and Jessie Carll, former civil rights activists whose marriage is faltering, live as virtually the only whites in a black development in Jackson; when Teddy's sister and husband, virulent segregationists, are killed in a car accident, the Carlls become guardians of their two racist children. And in
Before and After, which had its start as a one-act play, Ben and Carolyn Reiser, New Yorkers who have settled comfortably in New Hampshire, are torn apart when their seventeen-year-old son kills his girlfriend; Ben decides to conceal evidence, while Carolyn, a pediatrician who has seen the girl's corpse, insists on full disclosure.

In many of the novels, the chapters shift in style and points of view, sometimes going from conventional third-person to stream-of-consciousness first-person, and almost always, the precipitous moment of action takes place offstage. "One reason for this avoidance," Brown acknowledges, "is that I can't write action without a funny kind of embarrassment. Mainly, I think of myself as a meditative writer. The scenes that interest me the most are the ones in which people are thinking about what's going on around them."

She regards poetry, on the other hand, as a "purer vehicle for celebration and elegy," similar to music. "It's sufficient in poetry, I think, to be able to represent the world in a heightened way. This is why portraying events and action is so difficult for me, because I truly believe that just to give witness and call attention to things, to make familiar things new, is enough. Of course, you can't do that in fiction, you can't merely call attention to the world for two hundred pages." Hence, Brown was eager to return to poetry, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux will be publishing a sequel to
Cora Fry, entitled
Cora Fry's Pillow Book, this fall with the original work. She's back to work now on a new novel about an author researching her great-grandmother, a Jewish émigré from Russia who lived in an 1882 New Hampshire farming community.

Brown still doesn't feel she belongs in New Hampshire, where she continues to spend her summers, or in Houston, where she has lived since 1982, teaching fiction and essay writing at the University of Houston, but she has accepted her role as an outsider. As she plumbs the hard moral questions of contemporary and historical life in her writing, she feels this sort of mobility, which she regards as particularly American, gives her "endless chances to start again. Maybe I'm not putting down roots anywhere, but at least I'm putting down something."

-- Don Lee