Jul 16

Jul 16 Ben Shattuck discusses THE HISTORY OF SOUND: STORIES

Ben Shattuck’s new book, The History of Sound, is a stunning collection of interconnected stories set in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries.

In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In this ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

Your collection, The History of Sound, has a unique structure — the stories are paired, like couplets, with the second story revealing a bit more about the first, or bringing a new perspective or a new context. How did you come to this structure for your book?

About ten years ago, on a winter afternoon on Nantucket, when I was a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association, I was reading through a pile of old journals one of the archivists had left me. I’d been at the archives for weeks by then, researching an 18th-century bank heist that left the island community in ruins. I wasn’t having much luck untangling the heist (liars, accomplices, political interests, secrets long ago buried), so I’d expanded my search that day, looking through journals to get a general sense of island life in the decades following.

I opened one small journal from a woman in the 1820s. There wasn’t anything extraordinary at first. Notes on the weather. Friends’ names. Some things about her baby. But then I came to a page where she described discovering that her husband had another wife and child on the mainland, and how she’d left her home with her baby and gone to her parents’ house. She then described how her husband had found out where she was, and that when he arrived at her parents’ house, her father hadn’t let him in. Finally, she wrote, her husband left a pair of baby shoes on the doorstep. He walked away. I noticed he didn’t appear in her journal again.

I spent that afternoon walking the Nantucket beaches, thinking about the short story that I might write from that journal entry, not necessarily of the woman, but of one of the woman’s descendants discovering the journal, and how their life might be made fuller, more complicated, but more understood. And if I wrote that story, I would still call it historical fiction, because I would still be handling the material of history. The story would question how looking into the past can change someone in the present. Of course, I would also write that story of the woman, in the most down-the-line historical fiction way. And so, in a way, on that beach, thinking about that journal, a twin-story structure formed.

I think we all feel that any investigation into history — be it fiction or nonfiction, a look into one's ancestors, or larger cultural events — carries with it a natural call-and-response. There’s the writer or researcher looking into the past, and the material itself that’s drawn from the past. A duet forms between the writer in the present and those in the past who are awoken and speak through the instrument of research. In any linked collection, each proceeding story could add some context or expand the previous — but I think this two-story structure is uniquely fitted to a larger discussion of what ‘history’ is to us: the paired stories hint at an observation about the way historical fiction is usually written or presented.

A reader of this book will notice that—alas!—that story of the woman on Nantucket doesn’t really appear (though there is a version of parts of that story in the fourth story, “Graft”). But, still, with that story structure settled in my mind, I started looking for places where the connections between my stories could be made stronger, to enhance that duet of past and present. The most obvious and easiest way to show a connection is with artifacts, the things of peoples’ lives that drift through time and can reshape one’s understanding of something from long ago. With that in mind, I think the first paired stories I linked were “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” and” The Silver Clip” — connected plot-wise by a painting that a character in 1796 leaves on a farm (“Edwin Chase”), a painting that makes its way to present day to a story set, in parts, in the same house.

The Nantucket pair also set the tone for how other stories would be linked through the collection. Though a plot point usually connects a pair (like a painting or an apple tree or a letter), there’s an emotional question that brings them alive. “Edwin Chase” and “The Silver Clip” center on two women, separated by centuries in the same windswept house, questioning what it means to be left alone. Often, that question between the stories is inverted. For instance, the title story asks something like, What if we only get one chance at real love, and you spend the rest of your life wondering how you could have kept it? Its pair asks, What if you make the mistake of staying with your first love? They are also connected by a box of wax cylinders found under some floorboards.

The paired stories often take place in different times, but you play with the order — they aren’t always presented chronologically. With “Graft” and “The Children of a New Eden,” for example, a historical story is followed by one from a more modern perspective; with “Radiolab: Singularities” and “August in the Forest,” though, the more recent story — where an artifact from the past is introduced — comes first. How did you decide how to approach these pairings, and how to arrange them?

Playing with the order of the stories was one of the most satisfying parts of writing this collection! One of the best narrative tensions a writer can create is letting the reader in on a secret that a character has yet to discover, and then toying with that reveal. If you’re writing paired stories that involve multiple characters’ fates spread across large gulfs of time, that arrangement—of what the reader knows before the characters—becomes even more complicated and exciting, like multiplying two stories’ narrative tensions to make a third, greater sum.

I’m not quite sure how to untangle this question without getting deep into the plot points, but I can say this: each story is placed so that it will add to an understanding of the other and tighten the narrative tension. The second story in the pair doesn’t simply solve a mystery or the ending of the first—the second story often is solved itself by having read the first, while also solving something of the first. Does that make any sense? For instance, we might know the fate of characters in the second story by reading the first, but we might see that the protagonist in the first story has misunderstood what was really going on by reading the second. An example: if “August in the Forest” (2000s) and “The Journal of Thomas Thurber” (1908) were ordered chronologically, you wouldn't get that satisfying tension from page one of knowing what’s looming ahead for Thomas Thurber.

But, also, by ordering some stories chronologically, I was able to give characters more life, to hide little Easter eggs throughout the second stories, and make satisfying jumps in storylines. We find out the fate of someone in the 1700s with a line in the following story, set in the 2000s. Or, by mentioning a certain apple tree in “Tundra Swan” (2000s), I could quickly let the reader know we’re on the same Cape Cod farm as “Graft” (1890s), and that two people in “Tundra Swan” and “Graft” are related and experiencing the same (but inverted) fate (a mother leaves home in “Graft”; a child runs away in “Tundra Swan”).

The things that bind these stories together are often material objects. The very last line in the book (I won’t quote it here, readers should get to experience that!) seems to me such a remarkable way to sum up the ideas and themes that run through your collection. Characters discover hidden keepsakes; museums hold objects of personal and collective history. What draws you to these material memories?

My writing desk is in an old tool shed that my dad, who is a landscape painter, turned into a painting studio forty years ago. He’s since moved to another studio, and so I took his place. I’m here now, and from my desk I can see pinned butterflies, pressed seaweeds framed behind glass, a small bucket of antique buttons, old glass bottles, a dried wasp nest, an apple picking basket, a dozen mismatched dice, dried flowers hanging from the rafters, bell jars, animal skulls, shells, sea glass, fish vertebra, and more sketches and paintings and prints than I can count. This, in my mind, is the perfect place to write. I can name the origins of many of the objects, but some I can’t. They all have a little magnetic pull on my imagination, a story behind each. It makes sense that my stories would also be filled with objects like this.

One of the most beautiful objects in the studio is a very old mandolin, one of those bowlbacked that looks like a pear. The neck has broken and collapsed into the mandolin’s body, I’m assuming from the decades of moisture and tension the metal strings have had on it. Anyway, for a long time I thought the mandolin must be something my dad bought to paint for a still life. But a couple of years ago, I was talking to my mom in the studio, and she looked up, saw the mandolin, and said something like, I can’t believe we still have that. It turned out that her boyfriend had given it to her, back in the 70s, as a parting gift from a farm in Kentucky, after they broke up. After she left Kentucky, she came back to live with my grandmother, and then she moved to New York City, where she met my father. Here I’ve been, writing below this little monument to the moment my mother’s life pivoted, from her life in Kentucky to her life eventually with, well, me. There are objects like this everywhere, I think, silently sitting on our shelves, just waiting for someone to give them a voice.

Where does your writing inspiration come from? Did any of these stories start with a kernel of experience from your real life or from real-life events, for example? What kind of research did these stories require?

Years ago, in graduate school, I was trying my best to write stories set in the present day. Stories about relationships around me that my classmates might relate to — with texting and online dating and all the rest. But whenever I started a story like that, I would run out of steam, lose interest, and revert to my old obsession with writing about people who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. I don’t know why I find comfort in that time period — it just feels like the most relevant, pressing thing to write about. I think it might have to do with a process of stripping down all the noise of today — the phones and cultural references and spaces. In 1850, you mostly have two people in a cold room with a candle and loaf of bread, plus whatever relationship they share and which I could explore.

But there is a danger in writing historical fiction. It can become a theme park, can fall into a place that obsesses over lantern light or horse travel or outfit changes. The usual approach to writing historical fiction might be something like researching the life of a Mayflower passenger, then describing the terrible journey across the Atlantic, death and disease, the ever-present cold, the sound of the ship under a storm, the taste of the terrible food, the hunger, that first winter on land, and so on. As in, you find a life or event and build out an understanding of the past through that character.

To force myself out of historical fiction cliches, I started to take relationships around me, relationships I was confused or fascinated with, and just drop them a couple hundred years back to see what would happen. I started writing what I guess you could call “auto-historical fiction.” For instance, the bullying I saw at my New England boarding school turned into the seventh story, about loggers trapped in a blizzard a century ago. The tenth story, set in the late 1600s, is, in a way, about my relationship with a friend who found herself in a cult. I put my feelings about a breakup under candlelight in the fourth story. All to say: the historical stories (which aren’t all of them) are reactions between my own life and the lives in the past that I can only read about.

Where that story starts — the inspiration — can come from anywhere. An example of research: I’d read that Edison thought his wax cylinders could be used to record voices of people passed, and you could play the cylinders to remember them, which led to a paragraph that would become the foundation for The History of Sound. An example from real life: one of the first nonfiction pieces I published was an interview with a woman who discovered a 19th-century dildo in the chimney of her historic house, which became the centerpiece for The Silver Clip.

As for the research, besides my time at the Nantucket Historical Association, I didn’t do a ton of research for a story; rather, I’d find a book at a used bookstore that looked interesting and be inspired by something I’d eventually read in it. For this collection, these books include Historic Storms of New England, Setauket: Alias Brookhaven, Away Off Shore, Old Sturbridge Village Cooking, and The Great Auk, to name a few.

The landscapes in your book — Cape Cod, Nantucket, Newfoundland — are very vivid, and often very central to the stories. I wonder how you approached writing these places, not just in the present, but through time.

Well, in many ways, it’s easier to set stories from the past in rural settings, to feature landscapes from Cape Cod or Nantucket. Writing about downtown Boston in 1750 would be a huge task for a writer’s imagination and time, but writing about an outer beach on Nantucket in 1750 pretty much means just going out there today and describing what you see. I shy away from making the settings too hard to conjure, because I’d lose sight of the characters—who are the central elements of the stories.

My first book, Six Walks, was (in a way) about Henry David Thoreau, which meant I read a lot his writing, and I think I can say with some authority that this story collection is right within the Transcendentalist tradition — centering Nature as an instrument through which larger truths are transmitted. Most emotional turns, revelations, or moments of characters’ growth happen within landscape, within an observation of the weather or light, when they feel a connection to something under their feet over their heads. Though, instead of understanding divinity through Nature (per Transcendentalists’ beliefs), these characters gain some insight into their relationships or feelings. A moment a salt marsh is a turning point for a father’s life in Tundra Swan; an almost-felled tree deep in a northern forest is the place where a moment of reckoning comes in August in the Forest; stepping into a snowy forest in Origin Stories is the site of a long-overdue realization, and so on.

It was important to get these landscapes just right, and my approach was pretty simple: to draw on the thirty-something years of experience I’ve had living in southern New England, and just translate it to the page. The ‘black line of clouds’ that Hope sees in Graft, set in the 1890s, is right from a memory I have as a kid, standing on a hill and watching a blizzard draw over a blue sky.

You’ve written the screenplay for the film adaptation of your book’s title story, “The History of Sound.” I’m curious about how the processes differed from writing the story and working on the film — in adapting your short story to be a feature-length film, as well as in approaching the screenplay in perhaps a more collaborative manner than the story. Was the experience surprising for you in any way?

The director of The History of Sound, Oliver Hermanus, and I talked many times on the phone during the pandemic—he was in South Africa and I was here in Massachusetts. Keeping the short story in mind, we’d have wide-ranging conversations on what the film might look like, what scenes were important to keep, where the story could go to turn it from a short fiction to a feature-length film. After each conversation, I’d go back to my desk and work on the screenplay, thinking about our conversations.

Writing a screenplay in many ways is a lot easier than prose writing. In a short story, you have to write out descriptions of place, write dialogue, describe how those characters are talking and what effect it has on others, describe characters’ thoughts and how they move from one place to another, describe smells or tastes, etc, etc, etc. In screenwriting, most of that work is done by the actors and director, and by the nature of film, by viewers seeing actors in spaces. When I was writing the screenplay, all I had to worry about was the lines of dialogue and a brief description of where they were. It’s more like writing out recipes that you give to actors and a director. Being too descriptive can actually be a problem—you don’t want writing to get in the way of how an actor interprets a piece of dialogue or the director frames a scene.

But screenwriting is also a much sleeker instrument for storytelling. You just have two things, dialogue and scene setting, to build a plot and emotion. Because you don’t have a lot to use, it’s not very forgiving, but it’s very efficient. With just those two tools, you tell a story that actors, a director, producers, financiers, and myriad other collaborators need to see and feel and understand.

As for the actual step-by-step process: it started by me highlighting essential parts of the short story, elements that needed to stay. Then, I’d look at where there were big gaps in plot and write down some possibilities that I’d discuss with Oliver. Then I’d write out the scenes in Final Draft (screenwriting program), and then add and subtract and change as with any other piece of writing.

A throughline in The History of Sound is the artifacts, of course, but also, specifically, art — in writing, paintings, sculpture, music. Even a grafted tree becomes, in your book, a work of art. I’d love to hear more about how you see the relationship between art, history, and memory, and how you approached writing that in The History of Sound.

There’s no way to avoid this cliche, but it’s true: art does transcend time. I think the people in the in the 1600s who saw a Caravaggio painting felt much the same way as someone who sees it today. Someone who listened to Mozart in the 1700s might be moved to tears in the same way someone today would be. Someone reading a Bronte novel in her own time would be equally enthralled as someone reading the novel today. Transcending time means surviving time and resisting being forgotten. What resists forgetting more than a thing (music, art, writing) being carried through generations of emotions/feelings? Each successive generation cares because it hits on their emotions. Anything that seems like art — even an apple tree with creative grafting — suddenly can live way beyond the years of the maker, animated by its continued impact on the emotions of people from one generation to the next. So, it just makes sense to me that the best connective tissue for a story collection about impacts through time would be objects of art. These objects of art can brush away history, retain memory, and remake stories.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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