The big questions: an interview with Doris Betts

Christian Century, Oct 8, 1997 by W Brown, Dale

Not much. A few at least address the question because I mentioned it, and so they feel they have to. It seems obvious to me, but evidently it is not obvious. What I'm saying to you about overlay pertains to what you read as well. If you expect it to be there, you will see it. But nowadays, if you are not obvious, if you're not writing for the Logos Bookstore--and I'm not so sure I want to get categorized that way--you can have a problem. And I don't think the job of literature is preaching. But it is literature's job not to ignore the fundamental questions everybody lives with.

Say a word or two about Souls Raised from the Dead.

I had already written it and chosen that title when I found a poem by Czeslaw Milosz which actually says, "Raise me from the dead." It's a wonderful poem about the death of the poet's mother, who apparently was a victim of World War I, and he comes out of European suffering that for us is hearsay. The suffering gives his poems and his faith a resilience that he doesn't have to mention; he exudes it.

I got the title from a note that was sent up to me when I was reading at the university in Charlotte. I didn't have a title for the novel then, but read a section of the novel in which a woman goes to Durham into this seedy neighborhood where they make keys and stuff. A woman in the audience sent up this note on the back of a supermarket slip. She suggested the title. She said in a part of Atlanta that has now been torn down for urban renewal there used to be a plate-glass window that had painted on it: "Keys Made, Palms Read, Souls Raised from the Dead."

I thought--that's a gift--so I took it, and the fact that there was a poem with the same theme and almost the same phrasing was ideal. But the soul that is raised in the novel is not the child who dies, because dying is dying. The question is whether the father is to be raised from despair.

Is there a preacher in the novel? You're often very tough on preachers.

There's a preacher, and I'm afraid he's a satiric figure--he's deaf, but it may not matter. You know what Percy does at the end of The Second Corning, with the priest who just says the same old things over and over again but it may not matter. One may be a channel nonetheless. O'Connor does that too. I am going to finish a novel that is about a preacher--a serious, Presbyterian preacher from Piedmont, North Carolina.

I've always felt that to work with the big questions, you don't have to use only archbishops and kings. Surely it can be done with middle-class workers and farmers and beauticians. If not, then the Good News is not true. So the main character in Souls Raised from the Dead is a highway patrolman whose daddy was a shoe salesman. These are lower-middle-class southern people who happen to live in Chapel Hill and don't understand the university at all and find the professors rather puzzling. It is his daughter who dies, and it is his despair we wonder over. Will it lift?

I've done several readings from the manuscript in different places, and it's amazing the people that come up out of the audience. They'll come up terribly upset, because something has been touched in them. They have either had or cannot get kidney transplants--one of the issues in the book. Or they have lost a child, often through an automobile wreck, and they confirm for me that nothing is worse. If you're ever going to have to forgive the universe for anything, that's the hardest, that you should live on with your child having been ripped away. They all say one thing. "Don't you have it just get better. It never gets better." I believe that, and I don't want to be false to that, so I don't have the father end up with a miracle. He's going to grieve all his life. I do, however, believe it can be mitigated, that there is a context for that.