If Morning Ever Comes

A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE TYLER

Michelle Huneven lives in California and is the author of Round Rock and Jamesland.

Michelle Huneven: Was this your first book? Had you written fiction before? In 1964, creative writing was barely a college-course subject let alone a major or Ph.D. degree. That said, did you study writing in college? When did you first think of becoming a writer?

Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes was the second book I wrote but the first to be published. (I’d written an earlier novel toward the end of my last year in college.) My major was Russian, oddly enough. Writing was just a sideline, something I indulged in purely for fun while I waited to see what I was going to do with my life.

MH: Where were you when you wrote If Morning Ever Comes?

AT: I was newly married, working as a Russian bibliographer at the Duke University Library, when I wrote the first few chapters. Then we moved to Montreal, and after our plane landed, I forgot to claim the suitcase I’d packed my manuscript in. I realized it about a week later, but I decided it wasn’t worth the cab ride to the airport. Some time after that my husband went to the airport to meet a friend and thought to reclaim the suitcase from lost luggage, and then because I couldn’t find work for six months, I ended up finishing the novel just to entertain myself.

MH: What were the first seeds of this novel? How did you come to write it from the stance of Ben Joe, a twenty-five-year-old male? How long did it take you to write?

AT: My husband used to talk about a friend he’d made when he first came to this country from Iran — a young hospital orderly who was the head of a household of many, many rather feckless sisters for whom he felt personally responsible. I enjoyed fantasizing about that situation.

Adopting a male point of view was an act of defiance, in a small way. One of my teachers claimed that men could write from a woman’s viewpoint because they’d been raised by women, but women couldn’t write from a man’s viewpoint because they didn’t have the same intimate association with their fathers. I thought he was wrong, wrong, wrong.

It’s my recollection that the book took me nine months to write. In those days I didn’t rewrite — didn’t even seriously think, it seems to me now, and that’s why it was such a short process.

MH: There are, it seems, many themes and concerns in If Morning Ever Comes that you’ve continued to explore and build on in the fifteen other novels you’ve written in the last forty years. What, to your mind, are some of these? What are the themes and concerns you’ve left behind?

AT: I guess I do see some continuity in the issues of insider/outsider, of rootedness in a certain place, and of how much right we have to intrude in others’ lives or attempt to change them. But the fact is that If Morning Ever Comes almost seems to have been written by a stranger; I’ve moved so far away from most of its concerns.

MH: If Morning Ever Comes feels more Southern to me than many of your more recent Baltimore-set novels; there are African-American characters, and it has more of a small-town feel. It reminds me of Eudora Welty. Was she an early influence? Who were other early influences? Were any other of your early novels set deeper in the South?

AT: Now I am astonished by how very Southern the book is, or “Southron,” as a writer friend and I used to say derisively whenever we thought a novel’s Southernness seemed to be its main quality. I don’t believe the South is still so distinct a culture nowadays, although the book seems to me a faithful portrait of the way things were at the time.

Eudora Welty was an enormous influence. I thank her for giving me the idea that the world I was living in — a world very similar to hers — was a fit subject for literature. And I believe that some of the tone of voice in If Morning Ever Comes owes a clear debt to the world’s best writing teacher, Reynolds Price. His style was very contagious. When I was his student, back in 1958 through 1960, every last one of us wrote short stories that sounded like a combination of Reynolds Price and J. D. Salinger, if you can imagine.

My first three novels were set in North Carolina — this one plus The Tin Can Tree and A Slipping-Down Life. My fourth, The Clock Winder, described a young woman in transition from North Carolina to Baltimore. By that time I’d been living in Baltimore for several years; I guess it took me awhile to make my own transition, internally.

MH: What was it like to be such a young novelist? How did you cope with reviews — which, from what I’ve found, were largely positive, but several still had that penultimate paragraph of complaint? What early habits and stances adopted as a young novelist have lasted your entire career?

AT: I was so naive; I don’t remember thinking much at all about being a young novelist, and I didn’t understand for years how lucky I’d been to land with Alfred A. Knopf and my wonderful editor, Judith Jones, who is still my editor to this day. I think I just assumed that everyone who wrote a novel would be published sooner or later.

The reviews I don’t remember, except that one person said the book was “about as exciting as a cucumber sandwich,” which hurt my feelings at the time but now seems apt.

I had no work habits, no discipline, no system at all in writing my early books, and I believe it shows. All of that came later.

MH: What are your feelings about If Morning Ever Comes now, as you look back at it after writing so many other books? Have you reread it in recent years?

AT: I reread it just so I could answer these questions, and I’m amazed that it was ever printed. It’s a book by someone who doesn’t yet have anything to say.

MH: The psychology of the Hawkes family is beautifully understated yet accurate and timeless in its insights. Which to you are the most intense/devastating/memorable moments in the book?

AT: I was touched by Shelley and intrigued by Joanne, who, I see, is not an entirely virtuous character; I’m surprised I was capable of that much complexity. But I wonder if I liked Ben Joe’s mother back then as much as I do now. Now she seems strong and admirable and dignified, while back then, I believe, I meant for her to seem unnaturally cold. (Funny how that works. Now that I’m grown, I find Melanie in Gone with the Wind much more likable than I did in my youth.)

MH: The title comes from a passage in the novel — but why did you you choose this specific title and passage? Did you have any other ideas for a title?

AT: I always planned to use that title somewhere, after hearing a family friend tell the story that introduces the phrase. I don’t think it has much relevance to this particular novel, to be honest.

READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Why does Ben Joe go home to Sandhill? What is the triggering incident that makes him get on the train? What are some of the other underlying reasons that send him home?

2. One reviewer described the Hawkes family home as “loveless.” Do you agree? In what ways is the family conventional? In what ways is it unconventional?

3. What are the things that you’re not allowed to talk about at the Hawkeses’ house? Who enforces the no-talk rules?

4. How do you think Ben Joe feels being the only man in the house? How do his sisters treat him? His mother? His grandmother? What is Ben Joe looking for in his childhood home?

5. Who was Dr. Phillip Hawkes? What do we learn about him over the course of the novel? How does Ben Joe feel about him?

6. Who is Jamie Dower, and why is he in the book at all? Why does his death affect Gram so deeply? What does her reaction to his death say to her family?

7. This book is about alcoholism, love, family, adultery, divorce, money, and grief — and yet it is not at all heavy-handed or lugubrious. How does Tyler keep the pages turning? How does she use humor and quirkiness? What does she have to say about all these “issues”?

8. Why does Ben Joe go to visit Shelley? Do you think he knows why at the time? How do you feel about Shelley? What is troubling about Ben Joe’s relationship with her?

9. Why do you think Ben Joe’s father left his wife and family? Do you have sympathy for him? How do his children feel about his lover, Lili Belle, and their half brother? What does Lili Belle have to offer them?

10. In some psychological circles, it is said that children act out their parents’ relationship. If this is true, how is Ben Joe “acting out” his parents’ relationship. How is Joanne? Jennifer? How do the siblings do it as a group?

11. This is a book by a young novelist; Anne Tyler published it when she was twenty-two — three years younger than her male protagonist. Does it read “young”? How do you think she was able to embody the thoughts and language of her hero?

12. Joanne has left the family to marry — and returned after seven years with her daughter, Carol. Why do you think Joanne comes home? What are the possible problems in her marriage? Do you think she will stay married to Gary?

13. Anne Tyler is the author of sixteen novels, all of which are thematically related and address character and story in not-dissimilar ways. If Morning Ever Comes is her first novel — for those who have read some or all of the author’s other novels, in what ways is it a true Anne Tyler novel? In what ways is it unique and different from some of her other books?

14. When Ben Joe leaves North Carolina for New York again, how has his life changed? How has it stayed the same? How do you feel about Shelley and Ben Joe leaving together? Is Ben Joe realistic in his assessment of their potential life together?

15. Would you classify this as an optimistic novel? A realistic novel?