Stories are Coffins | A Conversation with Pete Beatty

By Gavin Thomson

Cuyahoga, Pete Beatty’s debut novel, is a mischievous mash-up of historical fact and revisionist fiction. It’s about two orphaned brothers, Medium Son and Big Son, in Ohio City, 1837. Medium Son, the narrator, is a carpenter who makes coffins. Big Son, his older brother, is a sort of folkloric, mythical figure—part Hercules, part Christ, part LeBron James, part Huck Finn—and Ohio City’s “resident spirit and architect.” Medium Son, aka Meed, both loves and envies Big Son. He also can’t wait for him to die.

Cleveland is Ohio City’s rival. When plans to build a bridge that will merge the two towns endangers Ohio City’s sovereignty and pride, Big Son sets out to win over his town and his beloved, Cloe—his “somewhat-sister”—by trying to swim faster than a boat. Most people cannot swim faster than a boat. Big Son, however, once used a big rock, from Lucifer, to beat the shit out of Lake Erie. Or so we are told: Medium Son does from time to time exaggerate, and so too does Big Son.

Beatty’s tone combines rustic Rust Belt drawl with cadences Biblical and mythic. Medium Son speaks like a Christian Homer with whiskey breath: “Before dawn put a rosy finger on Ohio I were bit again – not the puppy’s teeth but a foul-smelling whisper of S____head     wake up.” No typos there. Beatty’s style is as eccentric as it is eclectic. Also, it’s funny. The novel includes such sentences as “A touch of envy will not spoil my love, any more than pigs eating mess spoils their ham.”

I talked to Beatty about his style, his fondness for a friendly cow, the relationship between admiration and envy, and how stories are like coffins.

Gavin Thomson: The novel has a distinct voice and style, and it’s full of unique diction. Where’d you come up with the voice and style and what were you reading before you wrote the novel?

Pete Beatty: The book I was reading when I really dove into the project was The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which is written in what I think Kingsnorth called a kind of shadow language, using a lot of formations and things that are native to Old English, but cherry-picking swearwords and different sorts of styles to create the sort of language that no one ever actually spoke. It’s completely unpunctuated, I think there are no capital letters, and it’s one of those books you have to learn how to read. It takes a dozen pages every time you pick it up to get back into the flow. And the manic energy of that book from sentence to sentence, the kineticism, put a voice in my head, and that’s where the unusual and stylized parts began for me. Cuyahoga actually did not have punctuation in the first draft that I completed. It wasn’t a novel in verse or anything, but it was lineated a lot more obviously. There was a lot more white space; there were a lot more hard breaks. And for a variety of reasons, including the fact that one day I wanted to get the novel published, I decided to put the punctuation in. But I think that that original stylistic choice or perversion, or whatever you want to call it, wound up informing the voice.

GT: The novel incorporates a lot of historical documents—maps, newspapers, advertisements, and more. How many of the documents are taken word for word and how many are fictionalized?

PB: They’re mostly real. The newspaper snippets are either verbatim—or very lightly tweaked to satisfy the demands of plot—from Cleveland newspapers, either the Ohio City Argus or the Cleveland Advertiser. There are a couple documents where the chronology is a little bit fudged—like I took something from the early 1830s or after the actual events of the story. But the descriptions of the bombings and the civil unrest that occurred around this bridge in Cleveland are pretty much as they were. Dr. Strickland is a character in the book who uses cold tar to treat people’s teeth, and his kind of cool, sort of metal advertisement for incorruptible teeth I photocopied out of an old newspaper, and then he wound up becoming a character in the book.

GT: On the first page of the novel, Medium Son says, “Taste matters true – even if the truth is half rotten.” A lot of this novel is historically authentic, but how much does the gap between historical accuracy and historical fiction matter to you?

PB: One of my favorite [recent] books, just in terms of sheer pleasure from reading it, is Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. The second half of it really becomes a stereotypical rock star memoir, but the first half is much more of a true memoir. At the very beginning, Springsteen says, “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.” The very act of memorialization, the act of writing history, is—this is just my opinion—is guaranteed to get some lies in there, either through what you willfully admit or unconsciously admit, or how you choose to frame things. Maybe take everything Medium Son says with a grain of salt.

GT: In addition to being a coffin maker, Medium Son is a writer figure, and he says that by writing the almanac of his older brother, he is also building his older brother a coffin. I read elsewhere that you said, “Stories are coffins.” What do you mean by that?

PB: That in a way when you tell a story about someone you materially affect—presuming that the story is read or that there are people who listen to the story—that you start to change who they are; that in effect you kill one version of who they are and replace it with another one. Or, depending on the nature of the story, you can kill them all together. There’s a reason we use the phrase “character assassination.” A story is really a kind of container that we put people in, that we put ideas in, that alters them forever. It’s complicated. The extent to which a story is a coffin depends, but there’s a little death involved in telling a story and especially when you’re telling a story about living people. It puts me in the mind of Antigone, too. Obviously there’s a preoccupation in classic stories that come through in the book: Bible stories, The Iliad, and other things too, closer to contemporary literature. But the story of Antigone, the anguish that Antigone feels at not being able to throw dirt over the bodies of her brothers—we still read Antigone for a reason. A lot of the relationship between Meed and his brother Big is like [ . . . ] Antigone being inside out. Meed can’t wait to mourn his brother. The actual, living, breathing version of his brother is kind of an inconvenience to him. [Big] makes him feel inferior. [Meed] loves him, but he can’t help but wonder what life might be like without him. So maybe there’s a way in which he hopes that telling stories can kill his brother [and] make him feel better about himself.

GT: Would you consider Meed’s story a sort of premature eulogy of his older brother?

PB: I think that’s a fair statement. Another snippet of literature that always resonates with me is Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Because Brutus is an honorable man, because Cassius is an honorable man—because they’re all honorable men. Again it’s about taking the plot dynamics of what the character is saying and flipping it a little bit—what if Brutus is giving that speech instead? Or what if the speech is being given as Caesar is being stabbed, as opposed to after the fact?

GT: I sense a lot of Homer in the novel. You said that when you began writing this novel, you were thinking of a novel in verse—

PB: A little bit. I’m not a poet, probably to the betterment of everyone, including myself; but there is something about the rhapsodic nature of the Greek classics. A “rhapsode” is literally the name for the person who would perform. The Greeks didn’t really have mechanical reproduction; they didn’t have paper in a way that would make it possible to distribute the poems. I wanted to capture something of the incantatory, epithetic nature of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I almost wanted there to be little choruses or repeated things. There are a few things that made it through to the final draft. Big Son’s hair is frequently described as “shining,” which is a little nod to Achilles with the shining helmet. The character named Dog is frequently called “Two Legged Dog,” to distinguish him obviously from four-legged dogs but also as a little epithet. Considering The Iliad is almost three thousand years old and we don’t really understand the conditions under which it was created, it got a lot of the important stuff down. It still has a lot to say about violence, about power, and about the costs of valorizing those things, valorizing the person who can deliver the most power or the most effective force. I always think of a line from Anne Carson where she describes a body as a “lump of bad meat.” By the end of the novel, I wanted the characters to feel like these lumps of bad meat.

GT: There are also a lot of Christian elements in the novel, specifically a lot of fire and light, and the light and fire strike me as being at once heavenly and hellish, hard to differentiate. Meed says near the beginning, “Only that a house of fire is a credible substitute for the sun.” Does this mean that heaven and hell were closer than one might assume in the Midwest in 1837?

PB: That’s a good question. Obviously there are a lot of historical layers to unpack, in terms of the various versions of Christianity that Americans have been into and promoted and latched on to. 1837 was a time when you were right in the middle of the second Great Awakening, which was most intense in upstate New York but did bleed over into Ohio, into the Northwest Territories. I always thought that part of Meed’s voice is very much that of a person facing judgment, trying to get his story straight. He’s not doing the best job. I think of him as in the parking lot of heaven, about to go in, repeating to himself what really happened, or what he wants Saint Peter to think happened. The Midwest does have this kind of purgatorial nature. I think of it as a place that is unfinished and can never be finished because the rush to go west moved through so fast.

There are loads and loads of nods to scripture in the novel. I didn’t want to do the incredibly obvious thing and have a character named Big Sun be read immediately as a Christ figure, but to get the reader thinking a little bit about Christ as a celebrity, as a maker of miracles, as opposed to the son of God or the divine. Not for nothing does the word “celebrity” have its roots in the Greek word for “star.” There is something heavenly and otherworldly about fame. Jesus is famous. That is a fact. Even LeBron James, his nickname is The Chosen One. He has the words tattooed across his back. I wanted the novel to ask some questions about celebrity [or] fame as it shades into divinity. Meed is there to play the part of the reluctant believer. The experience he has with the pigs and the graveyard tracks pretty directly with a story that’s in the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), about an incident in a place called Gadara, where, depending on which version you read, Christ encounters either one or a few men who are touched by evil spirits, who have evil spirits in them. They’re wandering around in tombs in the graveyard of Gadara, and Christ heals them. He sends the evil spirits out of them. He sends them into a herd of swine that’s nearby, and the swine go rushing down a hill and off a cliff and into a lake and they drown. It’s a very weird, very novelistic detail in the Bible. There aren’t a lot of places where the question about what happens to the evil spirits gets asked in the Bible, but in this particular place [they get] put into a bunch of pigs, and the pigs all commit pig ritual suicide. So I was trying to turn around these parables, or little set pieces from literature, to see if I could shake a new meaning out of them. That’s probably the biggest place where religious literature is coming across clearly in the book.

GT: Medium Son is a carpenter like Jesus, but unlike Jesus he makes coffins. Is there something about Medium Son being a sort of morbid Christ that has anything to do with the anti-Christ?

PB: He’s like any normal frail and mortal person. I think part of the reason why we believe anything, any religious story, any Star Wars story, is because it makes us forget, however briefly, that we’re a mortal being whose lights are going to go out at some point—or we don’t know what’s going to happen. Medium Son isn’t Satan, but he is very human and he’s never not in touch with that flawed humanity.

GT: And the animals. The animals are his friends.

PB: I just wanted there to be a cow in there.

GT: The character Chloe escapes the city a lot. Is there anything in particular that she’s escaping?

PB: This is one of the few places where I lapsed into outright metafiction. At the end she literally escapes the book. Meed says that if you want to know what happened to her, you’re going to have to find her and ask her. But I think of it more as opting out to write her own path.

Speaking of ahistorical or counter-historical writing: the idea of a woman in 1837 just saying “nah” to the massive structural, legal edifice of male supremacy to just do her own thing—there’s no place she could’ve run off to where her being female wouldn’t have changed her.

GT: Is that why she comes back?

PB: Well, to keep it 100, as the kids say, she came back because it’s a story and I needed her to come back. And she had a great energy that helped me make this story interesting or attempt to make this story interesting. But this is another place where I did the ironic in the high irony Modernist sense: the second-to-last time she goes away, she doesn’t actually go anywhere; she just wanders off and wears a different outfit, so that her escaping is not really as physical or geographical as it might seem. She’s just saying, I don’t belong to you. I’m not a thing to want.

My number one goal is to get pats on the head. For a late millennial such as myself, it’s very important to get told that I’m doing a good job [laughs]. So I wanted to write characters who don’t look and act like me in a way that’s as respectful as I could, given my profound limitations as a human being.

GT: Big Son finds work building a bridge across the Cuyahoga River that will connect Cleveland with Ohio City.

PB: Writing this book had its germ, this real incident—there was an actual fight over the bridge between the two sides of the river in the 1830s, and that struck me as unbearably poignant and on the nose. There were these two groups of people that were very similar, so similar that they needed to be connected, and then they got into a fight over the exact nature of how they should be connected. As a friend of mine once said about Moby Dick, “Does the whale know it’s a metaphor?” The bridge incident seemed like a perfect place to start a story of people who are having these magnetic attractions and repulsions for each other. And it didn’t hurt that Hart Crane, who’s a great Cleveland writer, also has a book called The Bridge.

Gavin Thomson recently completed his MFA (fiction) at Columbia, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow and also nominated for the Henfield Prize.

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