The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Column: Writing about the ’60s links to today’s ‘troubled times’
Alice Mattison looked at the people who had gathered at the Mitchell Library in Westville last Monday night to hear her read from her new book, “Conscience,” and she told us: “I’ve been working on it off and on for seven years!”
Later she added, “If anybody here is writing a novel, I had more trouble with mine than you did with yours.”
But Mattison is no novice; this is her seventh published novel. When I met with her last Wednesday afternoon at her home in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood, near Archie Moore’s bar-restaurant (a scene takes place there in “Conscience,”), I asked her why it had taken so long.
“It was a hard book to get right,” she said as we sat in her kitchen, with her dog Harold lying at her feet. “It’s complicated. I kept writing version after version. I wrote probably eight or nine complete drafts.”
Yes, “Conscience” is complex. There are three narrators, including Olive Grossman, at times recalling her youth in Brooklyn when she was agonizing over how to protest the war in Vietnam, and Joshua Griffin, who shot and seriously wounded a police officer who was beating female students during an anti-war demonstration in New York. The novel is set in 2013, when Grossman and Griffin are married and living in New Haven, with ‘60s events still reverberating and complicating their relationship.
In an email announcing the publication of her book, Mattison summarized the plot: “’Conscience’ is about three Brooklyn girls who protest the Vietnam War. One becomes a violent revolutionary, the second writes a novel about the first and the third, Olive Grossman, is a writer and editor in New Haven still trying decades later to make sense of her past, understand her husband, Griff — another former protester — and respond to a new friend, Jean, the director of a (New Haven) drop-in center for homeless people.”
“I didn’t know I was writing a timely book until the November 2016 election,” she told us at the library. She said she decided to keep the book’s New Haven time “pre-Trump” because she had written all those drafts before 2016.
But she mused, “Today very much feels like those war years.”
“This book is about living in troubled times,” she noted during her library talk. “What do you do? Is it OK to go on living your private life?”
Mattison didn’t answer that key question at the library but I pressed her about it while we sat at her kitchen table.
“I think more than ever, because there is a threat to the imagination and art, we have to
practice art and the imagination, to read and write,” she said. “We can’t give up reading fiction and just read news stories.”
She added, “We have to continue to live our private lives, but with sensitivity to one another. That’s a necessary resistance to the hate and rudeness.”
Mattison and I reflected on those terrible, seemingly endless years of the Vietnam War and how each of us chose to oppose our government. I’m a few years younger than Mattison, so I was at Lafayette College and then Boston University at the height of the student protests. I participated in many non-violent actions, one of which resulted in my arrest. Mattison graduated from Queens College in 1962, when campuses were quiet. But after she moved to California and became a teacher at Modesto Junior College, the war became a huge issue.
Mattison and her husband, Ed Mattison, who was then a legal aid social worker representing migrant farm workers, were strongly opposed to the war. But since they were living in a conservative town, their anti-war protesting was done in San Francisco, where they joined large marches. They also bailed out people, many of them students, who had been arrested for peace actions such as passing out antiwar leaflets.
She told me she always remained non-violent when she was protesting. She was never arrested. Sounding like her book’s character Olive Grossman, Mattison said, “I was one of those who agonized about being arrested. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” She said although Grossman’s ruminations over what to do about the war are an autobiographical aspect of the book, “Olive is not based on me.”
Readers of “Conscience” who wonder where Mattison got the idea for the novel can find out by seeing her author’s note: “In the late 1960s, I briefly met an idealistic young social worker. I next saw her name a few years later in newspaper headlines, when her resistance to the Vietnam War had turned violent. I never met her again, but this novel results in part from my lifelong curiosity about how such a transformation might occur, and what its effects might be on people who knew and loved the revolutionary.”
Recalling her brief encounter with that young woman, Mattison told me: “She was a very nice, friendly social worker. She came to New Haven around 1967 and we had a meal with her. A few years later, there she was in the headlines. I looked at it and saw it was her! I wondered: how could this happen?”
This led to her thinking: “Suppose you had a close friend and it’s unthinkable she could become a violent revolutionary, but she does. How did it happen? How does it feel?”
When I asked Mattison the name of that real-life revolutionary, she declined to tell me. She explained her reluctance in a follow-up email: “If I were to say it, some people would inevitably assume that my character is an attempt to depict her. My interest is in the situation, not the particular person, whom I hardly knew.”
Mattison said she had wrestled with many possible titles for her novel, including “Imagination.” Recalling the naming process during her library talk, she said she was trying to figure it out one night with her husband. “I said, ‘What I should call it is “Conscience.” And he said: ‘Why not?’”
“I think that happened because we’re in another period where what’s happening in public life affects us so much,” she added. “It stops becoming background; it becomes foreground.”
During our interview, I asked her if she named the book “Conscience” specifically because we’re living in the Trump years. “I think so,” she said. “It’s more possible now to say out loud something as obvious as we need to exert our consciences.”
When I asked what she hopes readers will take away from her book, she said, “Wow” and thought for a minute. Then she said, “I’m always writing about how to live decently, even though the people we love drive us crazy. But this book looks at public life too.”
A woman at the library talk asked Mattison about choosing New Haven as the setting. Mattison replied: “Of course! What other place is there? I love writing about New Haven.” (Local readers will enjoy scenes set in Elm City locales such as Pepe’s, Edgewood Park, the New Haven Green, Blessings restaurant, the Institute Library and the footbridge over the Mill River in East Rock Park.)
Mattison’s library appearance marked the beginning of her book tour. She will be at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. (with Sandi Kahn Shelton) and Mattison will do a solo reading at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison Oct. 10 at 7 p.m.
Mattison said she is “thrilled and delighted” by the positive feedback to her book, especially from people she doesn’t know. At last she is reaping the reward for all those years of blank pages, cross-outs and revisions.