RITA DOVE'S EXPERIMENT

Through the Ivory Gate

by Rita Dove

Pantheon Books, $21.00

Rita Dove, who after Gwendolyn Brooks was only the second African-American to win the Pulitzer prize in poetry, has attracted considerable attention with the publication of her first novel Through the Ivory Gate.

The book tells the story of Virginia King, a black woman in her twenties from a middle-class family in Akron, Ohio--Dove's hometown. Virginia returns to Akron as a visiting artist at an elementary school for a few weeks, during which she visits her grandmother and an estranged aunt.

The visit, which takes place during the mid-seventies, provokes flashbacks to Virginia's years growing up in the Midwest and Arizona. She also recalls her college years and her life on the road with a traveling puppeteers group.

Through the Ivory Gate flows well, painting a poignant picture of the life of a young woman who is learning to deal with life's surprises. Virginia learns that her college boyfriend Clayton is gay and comes finally to acknowledge his acceptance of his identity.

At the climax of the novel Virginia is told by her aunt the reason for her family's sudden uprooting to Arizona: Virginia's mother's discovery of her father's incestuous relationship with his sister.

By moving back and forth between Virginia's struggles and loves in the present and her formative experiences with her siblings and friends in the past, the novel depicts a complex character that keeps the reader riveted throughout the story line.

Each of these sections forms a separate story which could stand on its own, but is woven into a longer narrative by the presence of the interesting main character and her inner searchings.

Despite the accomplishment of Through the Ivory Gate, Dove has no intention of giving up poetry. She is currently a professor of creative writing at University of Virginia, and recently completed a historical drama in verse called The Darker Face of the Earth, due out in the fall of 1993. Dove is also halfway through a manuscript of poems.

Dove, who is reading excerpts from her novel at the Cambridge Public Library today, recently discussed her work with The Crimson.

Q: I hate questions like this. But how much of the book was related to your personal experience?

A: Well, you have to ask that question. There are things that make it seem like it's really truly autobiographical. It happens in Akron, Ohio where I grew up, and then Virginia goes to Arizona and I was in Arizona, although I was there about twenty years after her. She also plays the cello. I grew up playing the cello and I knew what I was talking about.

So there are these surface touch stones which were drawn from my own experience--like the cello and the description, certainly, of my home town--but I did it more for convenience sake than for any sort of autobiography. I don't think her character, in the way that she sees her crises, is anything like me. If anything, I think she's more like a composite of many black women that I grew up with--a kind of way of looking at the world which was prevalent in the '70s, which is different now.

Q: Do you think it's less autobiographical than most first novels?

A: Well, yes, I think it's less, because I've been writing for a while now, publishing, and I got that autobiographical impulse out of me. I'm not interested in writing of my coming of age or something.

I also think Virginia is in some senses a little more reserved than I am and a little more cautious. Her family background is certainly different from mine because my childhood with my family was very warm and talkative, but I wanted to see what she would do if she were put into those situations.

Q: Some of those situations are quite touchy.

A: I realize they are touchy issues, and my feeling was that I wanted to present Virginia as a particular individual with her own hangups, her own problems and her own good points as well. It takes place in the '70s when people were not quite as informed. One of the things I felt was that I did not have to feel PC.

It's a similar thing in the beginning of the novel where there's this whole thing with the sambo doll and then the black doll that she doesn't want. It isn't that she doesn't want the black doll; it's that she wanted a doll with hair. So what if it was black--it just wasn't physically well-made. That's what she's reacting to. Of course it's misinterpreted as that carte blanche idea that she's ashamed of being black.

Q: Why did you choose to set it at that time, in the seventies?

A: I felt it was a time that hadn't been dealt with very much. I was really interested in the mid-seventies, right after the sixties, at the brink of Watergate and before yuppie time, when the entire country had kind of gone to sleep.

I think the people that came of age were old enough to witness the '60s but were also never easily turned into yuppies. There's this profound sense of unease that makes us want to sweep it under the rug.

Q: Where do you feel like you come from?

A: That's a good way of phrasing it. I do feel like I come from the Midwest. I mean I feel like that is my spiritual home although I've traveled all over. I was born in Akron, Ohio and that's where my parents are to this day and that's where my siblings are, so it is a kind of place to go home to.

I was raised with a second generation middle class background because both my parents came from working families and my father was the first black chemist in the rubber industry. We grew up as middle class but always with that sense of 'well you've got to save,' which came from that borderline where you're always rubbing up against two classes and things like that.

Q: Did you always want to be a writer or did you ever want to be a puppeteer, or something else in theater?

A: No, I've never had anything to do with theater, puppetry or anything like that. I wrote when I was young. I didn't think of it in terms of being a writer and I was a reader before I was a writer. I devoured books; I read anything I could get my hands on.

The poem I actually first remember I wrote when I was about ten. It's one of those rhyming things but it was fun. It was one of those Easter poems, about a rabbit who had one droopy ear and how he solves his problem. It was a narrative poem, you know.

Q: So what made you want to write?

A: I wanted to write not so much by telling a story I already knew but with the idea that language could lead you to a story.

When we talk about poems, often you don't know how its going to finish. It's not that you don't know anything about it, but that some kind of discovery has to happen in a piece of writing for it to be engaging. It happens and what you thought was going to be the climax happens quicker or more stunningly or deeper than you imagined. What you thought was going to be the ending was not.

Q: Was it difficult to make a transition from poetry to fiction?

A: It was as difficult as anything, really. But it did get harder as it went along, actually. It's like learning another language or another dialect. In the beginning it's very difficult to switch back and forth.

I actually began writing short stories right after grad school. It's different way of looking at the world, but in the end every word in a novel counts too; it just doesn't have that kind of starburst quality of poetry. I do think the rift between prose and poetry has been made greater than what it really is in this country.

Q: How do you feel about your success? How do you account for it?

A: I find myself continually amazed at it. It makes me incredibly happy, and I also realize that prizes and all those kinds of things are great, but it still doesn't mean anything. Still, when I go in and face the page, it's just me and the page. And it's still as difficult and scary and exhilarating as it's always been.

I think it's just a shame that it's taken this many years for another black American to get the Pulitzer in poetry. I don't think I'm the best of all those people; I was in the right place at the right time with some poems that people liked.

Q: Would you agree or disagree with being classified with other African-American women writer? How would you classify the novel?

A: Well, I wouldn't go against it; it's true. I think there are many different ways you can classify the novel. I think it's more meditative than some. It's not really a coming of age. It's more about how she goes from being a young adult to an adult, a second stage perhaps in growing up.

Q: Would you say you have a particular audience in mind when you write?

A: I don't think about audience when I write, and I don't really presume to think about audience after I've written, because I find that I'm always wrong. What I'm trying to get at every time I write is that I'm hoping someone will pick it up and read it with the kind of absorption that I read as a child...There's an incredible intimate bubble of life when you read. I write for that individual reading the book.

Q: Is there any poet or novelist who particularly inspired you?

A: Not just one. I think influence kind of goes underground. You think that you're influenced by someone and then you find out that it's someone else who influenced you. There have been influences throughout my life. One of my earliest influences was--this sounds really highfalutin, but it's true--was Shakespeare. I read Shakespeare before I was told it was difficult and it felt remarkably alive. I felt it was incredible that this man could write poetry and tell a story at the same time.

He influenced me because that's what happened with Thomas and Beulah [the collection of poems for which Dove won a Pulitzer], and the novel certainly has its lyrical elements. In terms of poems, I remember deciding that certain people were pretty cool, like Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and then later on Adrienne Rich and Derek Walcott and in terms of novels Toni Morrison and Garcia Marquez and Kundera, but that list keeps growing and changing.

Q: You're reading in Cambridge soon. Do you enjoy giving these readings?

A: I like to read. It's one of the final acts after writing in my room alone to finally connect to a larger audience and to see if in fact it moves someone. If it moves someone it's the greatest feeling in the world. You don't feel so alone anymore. It's kind of like saying I know how you feel, and isn't that what we all want, for someone to say 'yeah, I know how you feel.'