Everything, Even Love, Even Home:
An Interview with C. Morgan Babst
by Karin Cecile Davidson
Lush with the scents of ligustrum, a fallen magnolia, an evening breeze off the Mississippi River, New Orleans author C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel, “The Floating World,” sings the world of aftermath—of devastation, desire, the city’s dead. Here is the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, above and beyond the ruptured levees, inside the psyche of a family wrought with longing and despair at the sight and reek of their drowned home. The five members and three generations of the Boisdoré family reveal this story in ribboning, intersecting storylines, emphasizing the truth of the novel’s epigraph from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Each must be his own hope.”
The novel’s structure, divided into three parts, moves backward and forward in time. Infused with the depth of the floodwaters and the remaining waterlines, it revisits the past as it treads cautiously, willingly, into the future. There is complexity and control in the telling of this story; however, the telling doubles back, crisscrosses itself, and cannot be satisfied in not knowing what has come to pass. Well versed in the world of literature, a graduate of NOCCA, Yale, and NYU, Babst conveys her insight and knowledge by way of the Mississippi and surrounding lakes and bayous, against the insistence of Gulf waters. Writer Marion Winik praises “The Floating World” as “the most striking New Orleans novel inspired by Hurricane Katrina so far, a story as complex and nonlinear as the map of the Crescent City, interweaving the troubles caused by the storm with the specific difficulties one family already faced before the first raindrop fell.”
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KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: “The Floating World” is a beautiful elegy to New Orleans. Tell us, Morgan, how you found your way into the story of the Boisdoré family, how exactly you found the words that pay tribute to the city’s legacy, sense of place, depth of sorrow, and returning joy.
C. MORGAN BABST: I think I knew that I was going to have to write this novel from the moment I saw the flood on TV in the borrowed cabin where my family took refuge during the evacuation, but it took me quite a long time to feel strong enough to do it. In the aftermath of the levee failures, I kept telling everyone I was fine. The house I’d grown up in had been damaged, but my parents had insurance, nobody had died. Still, my body would crumple in on itself every other day or so—a stress-related ulcer, I suspect. I kept having to excuse myself in the middle of dinner. I’d wind up on the floor of public bathrooms, thinking about the Convention Center, about subsidence and the fraying marsh, about FEMA trailers, the Danziger Bridge shootings, the ruined oyster beds. The ulcers cleared up, somewhat miraculously, around the same time that Casamento’s—my favorite restaurant, my second home—reopened, and as the city began to get back up on its feet—battered, but recognizable, like someone recovering from a long illness—I began to write. I’d sort of wandered to New York while the evacuation order was still in effect and wound up married there, with a house, and then a child. Writing about New Orleans became a way to get myself across time and space back to the place I’d always called home, and I did it compulsively. The first draft was more than 700 pages long.
Cora drove east out of the city, along Lake Borgne. During the storm, the Gulf had surged into the lake, and the lake had broken, foaming, over its backs as the wind drove it headlong across the marshes. The water had thrown its creatures up on land, and the deflated carcasses of snakes, nutria, muskrats, and alligators now lay among the shivered planks and bricks that had once been the stilted houses of fisherman. –C. Morgan Babst
DAVIDSON: “The Floating World” is divided into three sections—“The Sorrowing Houses,” “Into the Trembling Air,” and “The City of Dis.” The first and third parts fly forward in a seemingly chronological sequence, and yet, we are pulled into backstory, provided with a fenestration from the overwhelming emotional buildup each character experiences, an escape which provides background and context. And then there is the middle section, Cora’s story, always recognizable by the “before/after landfall” headings, which reveals the account of the hurricane and the flooding that followed once the levees breached.
How would you describe the novel’s architecture in terms of its emotional wavelengths?
BABST: I love your word, “fenestration,” for the way the Boisdorés are hurled back in time; sometimes they’re opening a window for fresh air, sometimes they’re thrown through the pane. At one point, Tess is looking out the window of her flooded office, thinking about happier times, when the rotted sash breaks and the window falls, almost taking her head off—reverie works like that sometimes. And, sometimes it’s a storm that throws a tree branch through that window.
While I was writing the novel, I kept a drawing of a hurricane pinned above my desk. I wanted to give this novel about a hurricane a hurricane’s spiraling structure—narrative bands pulling inward toward an eye before circling out again. Cora’s storm narrative would be missing, I decided, just as she is missing, in various ways, throughout the novel—what happened to her during those days in the ruined city would be the hole and the center, the rift in the family and in her psyche that makes the story spin. As I wrote, though—as the characters, attempting to move forward in the aftermath of the disaster, are pulled backward again and again into the past in their regret and grief, in their desire simply to figure out what in hell had happened to them—I realized that the spiraling structure did not belong only to the storm, but was the architecture of trauma itself.
DAVIDSON: What a brilliant structure! Cora at the eye of the storm with the other Boisdorés spinning around her inside of that trauma, their multiple viewpoints leading us through the novel, uncovering loss and grief, history and memory, destruction and discovery. And through the discrete, interlacing voices of the five family members—Vincent, Joe, Tess, Del, and Cora—the story is presented in a mosaic of paths, through chaos to understanding, from what has happened—flood, abandonment, death—to what could happen—recovery, belonging, creation.
What led to this configuration—a family descended from freed slaves on one side and from a white, uptown background of oil money and wealth on the other? How did this combination of Creole and European legacies filter into the individual storylines, in the lines of communication among the characters, and across the breadth of the entire novel?
BABST: The problem of point of view was a hard one to tackle as I contemplated writing the novel—for the sake of integrity, authenticity, respect, and good rhetoric, I really needed to get it right.
The disaster, as Joe says at the beginning of the novel, was not an act of God, but an act of man—a disaster caused by negligence on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers but also by the governmental corruption, unbridled capitalism, and institutional racism that have plagued New Orleans since its founding. In order to tell even part of that story, I needed characters who would be able to breach the city’s many social bulwarks, whose histories led back into the city’s headwaters, whose relationships reflected and elucidated the city’s problems in ways large and small. I wanted to center them in the city geographically, socially, and in terms of what they suffer during the storm—they don’t get the brunt of it, but they aren’t unscathed either—so that from their vantage point a reader might glimpse the whole of what had happened here. A glimpse is, I think, as good as one can do when you have a disaster of this magnitude—a million people displaced, fifteen hundred dead.
That said, it wasn’t until Vincent, the patriarch, showed up and started talking, that I knew who anyone was. He told me about his ancestors and their long tradition of fine cabinetmaking and about his descendants, his granddaughters’ reliance on Ikea furniture. He didn’t understand his son Joe’s passion for art, didn’t understand Joe’s marriage to Tess—why he thought his love for this white girl could overcome racial constructs that were centuries old. And that’s when I knew I had it—had characters that would be able to lead me to some truth about what had happened in New Orleans, how our unresolved histories—the cracks in our levees, the corruption and racism we ignored—had brought this cataclysm into our homes.
He was no fool, no matter what they thought. He was dying was all, just like everyone was bound to do. It just happened to be his misfortune to die in drips and drabs rather than all at once … all words in fact would soon be changed to moving mouths and whispers … until all that remained were abstractions, insults, radio music. … Finally the bark of the trees would smooth to brown paper and the birds’ voices would lose the birds, the lake and river would evaporate into the clouds, and the cars and streets would roll away over the edge of the earth until nothing was left but their roar. –C. Morgan Babst
DAVIDSON: Vincent, the Boisdoré patriarch, lives in a world of memory. His voice is one of conscious, palpable things—the desire for a sweet potato pie, for the dog Sheba at his side, for the touch of his wife, Sylvia—and yet all of these reside in the past, the place his mind now travels, the world of Lewy Body dementia. To me, Vincent’s voice is the most evocative and elegant of the novel, relating the history of place, a lifetime’s work as a master furniture maker, and the passing down of that art to a future generation (in particular, his granddaughter, Del, whom he remembers by her given name, Adelaide). In her New York Times review of “The Floating World,” author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton finds Vincent “one of the most vibrant” characters, “a portrayal that’s impressively unrestrained, even Faulknerian.”
I understand that Vincent’s voice is the one that led you into the novel. Would you tell us how you realized from this voice that you had found your novel? And how would you describe Vincent’s development in comparison to that of the other characters?
BABST: I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that Vincent just showed up one day: I was sitting on a hill with a blank page in front of me, and suddenly I was with an old man as he wandered through a forest of fallen pines, looking for his dog. As he talked, he and I both realized that the dog had died in 1979.
Writing Vincent felt more like transcription than creation—his voice was so insistent that it makes me almost hope that ghosts are real because otherwise I’d probably need to have my head examined. Every time I sat down with him, the words just came—I’d look up, and it would be five hours later, and I’d have ten pages of text in front of me. Of course, I’d done some research into Lewy Body dementia, learning, for example, that people with the disease frequently have comforting hallucinations of loved ones, and I’d also interviewed Rupert Kohlmaier, a master cabinetmaker in New Orleans whose workshop I’ve visited since I was a child. Even given that research, though, Vincent should have been harder to write, but he wasn’t—when I looked for him, he was always there.
A flock of birds came tumbling in from the north, fighting for headway, wings folded, wings open, dipping, rising, circling each other. A clutch of them alit on the top of the pecan, then took off again, black darts against the sky. –C. Morgan Babst
DAVIDSON: Images of birds, wings, and flight appear throughout “The Floating World.” As the novel begins, Joe glimpses the uncommon “hawk perched on a peak of the Mississippi River Bridge.” To Del, “A Mardi Gras Indian’s suit” with its “finely worked crown of feathers” is “a sort of war yell in the midst of all this silence and mud.” Cora sees the child Willy appear naked at the window during the flood, wearing only a pair of water-wings; repeatedly imagines Willy’s mother Reyna as gone from life, “her eyes plucked out by birds;” gazes upon “the black neck of a cormorant” and remembers “the drift of leaves … changed to a flock of gulls.” Inside her home on Esplanade Avenue, Tess witnesses “a green flurry, the dark ripping open as green feathers tore through it …” A “Quaker parrot” with “Day-Glo wings.” Joe recalls from his childhood the St. Joseph’s Night masker, “dressed in deep orange plumes like a magnificent bird of God.” The flock of birds appears to Del, perhaps a murmuration, settling for only a second before filling the sky once again. And in the end, there is the sweet “little, dun-colored bird” that Cora takes as one of many “small degrees of illumination.”
The metaphor of flight is not lost here: the flight of New Orleanians before and after the storm; the helicopters that saved so many from rooftops, those unable to flee before the floodwaters drowned their homes, as well as family, friends, and strangers; and the eventual migration of winged creatures back to the city. The strange absence of birds in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina cast unearthly, almost unbearable stillness and silence on the city. Did this phenomenon call you to take notice of their gradual return and to include them in “The Floating World”? What else can you tell us of these images?
BABST: You know, it’s funny—I was clearly preoccupied with birds while I was writing the novel, but I’m not sure if I ever would have noticed what a strong motif it is in the book if you hadn’t pointed it out. One of the strangest and most interesting things about writing is that it can show you what your subconscious is up to when you’re not looking.
In this case, as you say, flight—in terms of evacuation—was very much on my mind. As Andrei Codrescu said, “An evacuated city is an automatic ruin,” and yet the city’s failure to evacuate its most vulnerable citizens was what made the climatological cataclysm into a human nightmare. So, in the novel, it is flight that sets the story in motion: when the Boisdorés flee the city, leaving Cora behind, they have made a mistake that not only endangers her but imperils the family as a whole. Of course, Cora herself is the one who makes the decision not to leave—in her own mind, she’s “flighty” and even sometimes thinks of herself as a bird, but she’s not the migrating kind. She’s never been able to leave her native habitat, at least not until it is destroyed by the flood. Her sister Del, on the other hand, has already flown the coop. When the storm hits, she’s living in New York, which means that she sees the flood for the first time as most of us did, in those eerie aerial shots of rooftops floating like islands on water. It is from this bird’s-eye vantage that she gives us the city in her first scene, descending over the lake on her flight home.
There are plenty of large-format metaphors to be made here, but you can probably chalk up the prevalence of birds in the novel’s New Orleans to the prevalence of birds in New Orleans proper. When we were in revisions, my editor said to me: “Does it have to be so hot and humid all the time?” I laughed. “Well, it was August and the power was out,” I said, “so, yeah, I think it does.” There are so many birds in this city. Just this morning, my dog and I greeted a blue heron that was grazing in somebody’s flowerbed on Prytania Street. We are right up against nature here; we can’t ignore it; we can’t escape it. The green is almost threatening. Like the mockingbird that wakes Joe and Vincent up, it pulls us out of bed, away from our houses. It circles above us in the air like a hawk.
She would have liked to have it explained, why she was drawn back here … to a place that offered them nothing of practical value, a place that was so actively and so vividly falling apart. Her best answer was that she felt the need to fix what was clearly unfixable, to save what was already lost. But it had more to do with the water that hung in the air, the smell of old wood, the rumpus of tubas and drums drifting up from distant avenues. –C. Morgan Babst
DAVIDSON: Drawn to the sensory—especially the redolence of flowers, “the old woody perfume of her grandfather’s workshop,” even bourbon and the blues—as well as to the utilitarian—how a blade carves wood, “more tension, a hint of threat, petrified and polished”—Del recognizes how drawn she is to legacy, to “the workshops of all the Boisdorés who had come before,” to freedom through art. There is a quality to life in New Orleans in which one understands the beauty of imperfection and impermanence, or perhaps of things gone awry or just their own way—in the tangle of magnolia branches, fallen during the storm through the Boisdorés’ roof; in “the wisteria wrapped around the pecan tree’s dead boughs;” in the brilliant blues of “ukiyo-e … the pictures of the floating world,” through which is understood, “everything, even love, even home” is fleeting, impermanent, “ephemeral.” Joe, Del’s father, even says to her, “Goddamn … You’ve got it bad, don’t you. I didn’t want this for you, Del. I didn’t want you to sacrifice yourself to the ruins.”
And so the question is, what of New Orleans and Del and belonging and the idea that “back is forward” and “forward is back” and the fact that the ruins will sweep you up and hopefully not under? What of Del and coming back from a bristling New York City experience to the love and jumble and heritage of her hometown?
BABST: I think, for Del (and for me), what draws her home to New Orleans is the same thing that sent her away: that it exists on the brink of destruction. As New Orleans celebrates her 300th year, we are reminded that this has always been the case—the city has burned, it’s drowned, it’s suffered epidemics, it’s never taken care of its citizens as it should. But somehow that’s what makes it such a fertile place to make one’s life.
As I argued in my essay in Guernica on funerals, we’re always in the presence of death here—my daughter is learning to ride her bicycle right now around the 185-year-old cemetery down the block from our house—but it’s precisely that closeness with death that makes us live with a vengeance. This is not a new thought, of course, but I do wonder why we tend always to focus on the existential crisis rather than what I like to think of as the existential calm—the way that, after coming to terms with mortality, a person might settle into a more meditative and attentive existence in the present.
For Del, the revelation that everything she loves—her city, her family, even the idea of home—could be destroyed overnight only makes her love it all more, hold it all the tighter. As she tells her friend and lover, Zack, near the end of the book, “I’ve already lost too much. Maybe half of it? Twenty-seven thousand acres of cypress forest? A football field a day? My sister’s gone and my grandfather’s halfway out of his mind and my parents are done and the house I grew up in …but I’m not going to lose the rest of it, okay? I can’t.” She’s going to salvage what she can from the wreckage—she’s going to continue her family’s tradition of cabinetmaking, keeping her grandfather’s memory alive even as he loses it—and use it to build meaning, to create for herself a more authentic and purposeful life.
DAVIDSON: Morgan, in respect to this novel and to your essays and stories about New Orleans, is it the city’s sense of home, the languor of the days, the song of ships on the river, the Sazeracs and seafood gumbo, the jazz and blues, and the long vowel accent that guide your writing? In the wider sense, what are your obsessions and fascinations, where and to whom do you turn for inspiration, how is your path lit? And finally, now that New Orleans is home once again, what lies ahead?
BABST: For a decade now, I’ve been writing almost exclusively about New Orleans, in part, because I was desperately homesick while I lived in New York and, in part, because I feel that I know the city well enough to be able to share it with those who want to know what this place is, why it is so strange and so troubled and so lush. I wouldn’t say that it’s any one thing about the city that inspires me—when I try to write about it, I want to conjure it whole.
The canon is full of great writers who have spent time writing about New Orleans, of course, from Armand Lanusse to Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin to Walker Percy, and I’ve been excited by new work from Anne Gisleson, Maurice Ruffin, and Jericho Brown, among many others. I find, though, that when I need inspiration, I look for it not in literature but in visual art and in nature. If I’m stuck, I’ll go down to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and spend time with the new exhibitions—I’ve recently been struck by the sculptural abstractions of Leonardo Drew and William Eggleston’s photographs. Or I’ll drive with my daughter across Lake Pontchartrain to a friend’s farm where we can get mobbed by ponies and feed the pigs. Or I’ll go out to breakfast with my dear friend, the photographer Frank Relle, to talk about ducks, femmes fatales, or the sublime. Now that I’m back in New Orleans, something noir is coming, and I may leave the city to meet it—only on paper, though. I’m not leaving this place ever again. Except maybe in advance of a storm.
Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor