Essay

Meeting My Character

Joanna Hershon

March 11, 2014

This week, Joanna Hershon, the author of A Dual Inheritance (now in paperback!) and The German Bride blogs for The Postscript on meeting a man who embodied her imaginary character. The Postscript series is a special peek “behind the scenes” of a book. It’s a juicy little extra something to add to a book club’s discussion and a reader’s understanding of how the book came together.

To “host” Joanna at your next book club meeting, request her through JBC Live Chat.

I’ve come to call A Dual Inheritance my

own “crackpot anthropology project”. Not only does the novel feature the field of anthropology and several related themes, but also my research mainly consisted of long, digressive and almost consistently fascinating conversations with a diverse array of people.

Because I was beginning the story in the early 1960’s in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, I set out to talk with family and friends who lived there around that time. One of my dearest friends (I call her my fairy godmother) attended Radcliffe in the late 1950’s and I spent a lovely day interviewing her. I spent much of the time trying to get a sense of her daily life — where she spent her Saturday nights, her routines, etc. The conversation flowed easily and, emboldened, I asked her if I could run a potential character by her. I’d created the basics of Hugh Shipley from my imagination– he wasn’t based on anyone in particular– and so I’d wanted to get a sense if he seemed believable. I described my character the way I would describe a friend, and — nervously — I asked if he sounded authentic, like someone she might have known.

She looked stunned. “You need to meet Bobby Gardner,” she said.

Yet another reason to add to the list of why I call her my fairy godmother.

When I began looking for information about this mysterious “Bobby,” I didn’t have to look very hard. Robert Gardner is a celebrated anthropologist and filmmaker and was the Director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University from 1957 to 1997. I ordered all of his books, and ordered and screened several of his films including the seminal Dead Birds. I couldn’t get over their visual language — so sensitive and lush. I tried to envision the film shoots, especially the older ones. What was it like, I wondered, to travel to remote locales such as New Guinea over fifty years ago? What went on behind the scenes?

After our mutual friend introduced us over the phone, I took a trip to meet him. I was nervous, but I needn’t have been. He was as unassuming as he was compelling. Meeting Robert Gardner was like meeting my imagined character but minus the rather dark side of the character (as far as I know the actual personal life of Robert Gardner shares nothing in common with Hugh Shipley). But the aesthetic interests, the ethical concerns, the disparity between the ideals of his illustrious family and the burning desire to understand a wide range of people — all of these issues and more might have sprung from my imagination, but once I met Mr. Gardner, he brought it all to life. He deepened my understanding of every aspect of my burgeoning character.

Had I not met Robert Gardner or learned about his films and talked with him on a spring day in Massachusetts, I would have written the character of Hugh Shipley but he would have been missing a critical part of himself. And so would I.

To learn more about Robert Gardner, visit his website: http://www.robertgardner.net

To read more from Joanna, read her Visiting Scribe posts here.

Joanna Hershon is the author of the novels Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride, and A Dual Inheritance. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, and two literary anthologies, Brooklyn Was Mine and Freud’s Blind Spot. She is an adjunct assistant professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, their twin sons, and their daughter.