Such a nice girl. There’s the turntable! I’ll put a record on while you pour us some brandy, Fred. Just a taste for me.
I’ll have a double. Brandy’s the one thing the French do well. Now I wish I’d hung onto that maryjane. Goes well with music.
FRED pulls a joint from the pocket of his bathrobe. He lights it and passes it to ROBESON.
Maryjane? Say, you are an old timer. Here, try some of this.
Poor J. Edgar! But he’ll disappear at sundown, with the rest of us. Meanwhile…
EINSTEIN disappears into the house.
Meanwhile, let the old troll get a taste of his own medicine. My, this is nice, Fred!
Where’d you get this?
At the nursing home. It’s medical marijuana.
They follow EINSTEIN into the house. The stage is now empty; we hear only their voices.
Medical maryjane! See, Albert, the world is progressing after all. On some fronts. It’s what Marx called the interpenetration of opposites.
What’s that, Paul?
We hear the scratches of a record starting up, very loud.
I said, where’s that French brandy?
Coming up, gentlemen.
As the LIGHTS DIM, we hear ROBESON on record, singing “The International.”
Ah, the old pipes. Not half so bad as I had feared.
Paul, you are too modest.
I’ve never been accused of that before, Albert.
You sound wonderful. And such a fine old song, too.
“FRIED GREEN TOMATOES”
TERRY BISSON INTERVIEWED BY T. B. CALHOUN
Is writing a political project for you, or an artistic project?
I reject the distinction, at least for fiction. Though I have done a lot of straight propaganda writing. For several years I helped write and edit the newspaper of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. For me propaganda is about One Thing, in that case trying to encourage, indeed to build, an anti-racist resistance among white people. Everything was bent to that end. Fiction writing is by definition about complexity.
How did you get into writing? Was it something you always wanted to do?
Ever since I was a teen. I was seduced by the Beat Generation back in the 50s. They were in LIFE magazine and they were so cool. I wanted to get away, out of the South, out of the suburbs, indeed out of 50s America where I was born and raised.
I was always a reader but now I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. I even subscribed to the Village Voice. I’m pretty sure I was the only subscriber in Owensboro, Kentucky.
What is your personal background?
Pretty conventional, middle class, small town Upper South but a liberal family. I was raised in the suburbs but my mother was one generation off the farm. I’m old enough to remember coal stoves and squirrel suppers, but I was raised in the new post-war suburbs, two cars and skinny trees. My father came from the North (Illinois). I was a TVA baby.
My Kentucky family was (and is) pretty liberal, from the days when the “solid south” was still Democratic. FDR brought them electric lights and concrete roads. Once in my twenties, home from New York, I tried (probably foolishly) to explain to a favorite aunt why I was a radical, a Marxist, an all-round anti-war hippie rebel. She nodded and said, “You are still a Democrat, though?”
I said sure.
Did you go to college?
English major. Very conventional. But committed. Literature was my thing by then. I ended up in New York, trying to sell a Kerouackian novel which never sold, and ended up working for romance magazines, softcore porn mags, astrology and western pulps, Enquirer type tabloids, low-end publishing in general. And discovered I liked it.
No science fiction?
SF was my first literature but I outgrew it, or so I thought. I wanted to be a serious novelist. I was working on a “serious” novel called Eats Corpse for Rare Coin, based on my experiences in the tabloids. The problem was, it kept getting short instead of longer. It was ’68 and things were busting loose all over. I quit trying to write and joined up with the hippie movement in the Southwest.
No politics?
We were all political in those days, or so we thought. I went to all the anti-war demos, but I wasn’t part of the organized Left. That came later. I spent a lot of time in hippie communes in the Southwest, and later back in Kentucky.
I didn’t become actively political, in a real way, until the later 70s. I was one of those who got organized by the Weather Underground, by Prairie Fire and by the groups they organized after they broke up. My wife and I moved to New York and did a lot of work about Puerto Rican Independence. Then the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. At the same time, I started writing again. And it turned out to be Science Fiction!
Go figure.
Ever write for comics?
My first paying free-lance stories were for Creepy and Eerie. I edited a comic mag, Web of Horror, for a while, and even wrote a series for DC. But I never liked the superhero stuff and never passed the “Marvel test.” (Don’t ask.) A couple of years ago I worked on a project with Stan Lee himself, but it came to naught.
Where did you get the idea for The Left Left Behind?
From France. A French writer and critic, Patrice Duvic, suggested that we work together on a book in which the world is a better place after the Rapture, minus all the Born-Agains. I thought it was a cool idea. Patrice had cancer and died before he could do much on the project, but the idea and the inspiration was all his.
I swiped the beginning of the story, the encounter with the prophet in Israel and the disappearances on the airliner, straight out of the Left Behind movie, then made up the rest. The ending, by the way, the scene on the train, is swiped almost word for word from R.A. Lafferty’s wonderful utopian story “The Interurban Queen.” Find it if you can.
Did you see the movie The Rapture? Did you like it?
Several times. A lot. It was written and directed by the great Michael Tolkin (who also wrote The Player). Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, and a great ending. But much much darker than mine because it takes the idea seriously. See it!
You write a novel about John Brown, Fire on the Mountain. Did that come out of your work in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.
Totally. I became fascinated with the old man, and visited Harper’s Ferry and Kansas, where he fought a guerrilla war that prevented Kansas from entering the union as a slave state. Brown was not a nut, as the right would have it, or a martyr (as much of the Left sees him) who sacrificed his life for a just cause. He was in my view a seasoned and effective fighter who might have succeeded. My novel is about what if he had. And the nation of Nova Africa in my novel was inspired by the Republic of New Africa (the RNA), revolutionary Black nationalists dedicated to liberating the Deep South.