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Spartina by John Casey

Spartina Patens grows all the way down the East Coast from Canada to Florida. It can grow from 1 to 4 feet and get matted down in the rain and mud. Spartina is very important to the environment and helps to prevent flooding.

John Casey, Pleased but Humble, Savors Late-Blooming Success

by Edwin McDowell

New York Times Dec. 7, 1989

John Casey is pleased, of course, that his ''Spartina'' won this year's National Book Award for fiction, but there is little chance, he said, that the prize will ''go to my head.'' Why? Because two months ago his brother-in-law, Dr. Harold E. Varmus, shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Last spring, Mr. Casey's niece, Jessica Tuck (who plays Megan Gordon in ''One Life to Live'') appeared on the cover of TV Guide. And another brother-in-law, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, formerly the Minister of Mines and Energy in Peru, is about to publish another book on economics -a subject Mr. Casey failed at Harvard.

''Everybody in the family is very nice to me about my efforts,'' said Mr. Casey, who is leaving for Stockholm today with Dr. Varmus to attend the Nobel awards ceremony on Sunday.

Besides, Mr. Casey is hardly an overnight sensation. Now age 50, he has been writing for more than 20 years. During those lean years, he published another novel, ''An American Romance'' (1977), and a novella and three short stories under the title ''Testimony and Demeanor'' (1979). He has also completed the first draft of another novel and another collection of stories that will form a trilogy with ''Spartina.''

.....The book received pre-publication praise from Ann Beattie, Paul Theroux and George Garrett. In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Susan Kenney said ''Spartina'' was ''just possibly the best American novel about going fishing since 'The Old Man and the Sea,' maybe even 'Moby-Dick.' ''

Carol B. Janeway, Mr. Casey's editor at Alfred A. Knopf, said: ''What distinguishes John is an extraordinary respect for and complete control of individual words, so that every word in a sentence or paragraph carries its maximum resonance and weight. He has what I would call a 'Japanese style,' which is to say one in which everything extraneous or decorative is pared away to leave the beauty of maximum simplicity.''

John Dudley Casey divided his youth between Worcester, Mass., his birthplace, and Washington, where his father, Joseph Edward Casey, was a Democratic Congressman from 1934 until 1942, when he was defeated by Henry Cabot Lodge in a race for the Senate. Paving the Way for Kennedy? ''He was a Massachusetts Irish politician who adored F.D.R., when most Irish in Massachusetts were opposed to lend-lease and were not eager for Washington to take care of people - that was the job of Mayor Curley,'' said Mr. Casey the other day in a telephone interview from his office at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, where he is a professor of English literature. Referring to John F. Kennedy's subsequent victory over Mr. Lodge, Mr. Casey added, ''J.F.K. knocked Lodge off the next time around, and I like to think the old man softened him up.''

Mr. Casey wrote poetry in high school in Washington, but at Harvard he tried acting. ''In my sophomore year I was in four plays,'' he said, ''because I discovered I did not stutter on stage.''

In accepting the fiction award last week, Mr. Casey told the overflow audience in the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre hotel that he started to write partly because he stutters. ''I had to think of lots of words to replace the ones I couldn't say,'' he said.

He might have been onstage more often had he not been expelled after failing economics and violating college regulations. ''It was the traditional sophomore year filled with craziness and despair,'' he said. After six months in the Army, he was re-admitted to Harvard on probation, where he majored in Russian history and literature. Barred by his probationary status from acting during his junior year, he wrote stories and began a novel.

After college, Mr. Casey enrolled in Harvard Law School, bent on a career in diplomacy or public service. In his last year he took a workshop with Peter Taylor, the novelist and short-story writer, who encouraged him to become a writer. William Abrahams, a literary book editor, told Mr. Casey to discard the novel he was working on, but gave him $300 to encourage him to write another.

''The psychological thrill was huge, but I still hedged my bets by passing the D.C. bar in 1966,'' Mr. Casey said. For a time he practiced law with his father, but then accepted a one-year fellowship to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He liked it so much he stayed three years.

During that time Mr. Casey completed a novel, which he sent to Mr. Abrahams - who promptly rejected it. ''I was so dazed by his rejection letter,'' Mr. Casey recalled, ''that I never read the novel again.''

But he had a suitcase filled with stories, two of which he sold to The New Yorker, another to Sports Illustrated. Emboldened by the ease with which he sold them, he and his wife bought a four-acre island in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. There Mr. Casey fished, raised vegetables and published a few stories, as well as freelance articles about the outdoors.

Those nonfiction pieces proved helpful to his fiction. ''Having described fishing or cross-country skiing with no emotional resonance,'' he said, ''when you use them in fiction the rough edges are off - you can use it as though the character had been doing it all his life.''

After Mr. Casey had been living on on the island about four years, Mr. Taylor, who was on the faculty at the University of Virginia, invited him to teach writing there. He planned to do it temporarily, but by then he had two daughters. ''I got hooked on having a salary and being around students,'' he said.

Because of the difficulty of teaching full time and writing, Mr. Casey said he takes off as much time as he can afford. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim foundation and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1979, Knopf published Mr. Casey's story collection. But his publishing triumph was marred by a number of personal losses. Within a year, his godson and former student, Breece D'J Pancake, killed himself at age 26. Mr. Pancake was a talented writer and his posthumously published collection,''The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake,'' received excellent critical notices; Mr. Casey wrote the afterword. Mr. Casey's father died of cancer. And he and his wife divorced. (Mr. Casey has since remarried, to Rosamond Pinchot Pittman, an artist and calligrapher. They have one daughter and another child on the way.) His trilogy will have taken about a decade to finish. ''When people hear that, they often make the mistake of admiring the virtues of patience,'' Mr. Casey said. ''But when I started, I thought it was going to take only two years. It's like La Salle - he comes out from French Canada, finds the top of the Mississippi River and thinks it's going to take him a week to find the Pacific. So he keeps on going. I think of myself as La Salle."

John Casey's Ship Comes in with a National Book Award for His Novel About Fishermen's Lives

By Kim Hubbard, Linda Kramer

January 22, 1990

Though John Casey has always considered his stutter more an inconvenience than a disability, it has subtly affected his life. In high school, it drew him to music. "No one stutters when they sing," he says. "Singing is one of my minor vanities." At Harvard, the problem thwarted a budding interest in a young woman named Diana—when Casey called her home, he couldn't spit out her name—but also fostered an interest in the stage. "I read for a part and discovered I didn't stutter, because I was acting," he says. Law school—also at Harvard—was another matter: "I could only argue the side of the case that had the fewest hard consonants in it," he once explained. "Meanwhile there were 150 people in the room ready to tear you apart verbally. I mean, this was not speech therapy class." Ultimately, Casey says, "I became a writer, in part because I always had to think up lots of words to replace the ones I couldn't say."

On the printed page, freed from the tyranny of Bs, Ds and Ts, Casey, 50, achieves a true eloquence that was acknowledged in November when he won the National Book Award for his second novel, Spartina. It is the story of a Rhode Island fisherman's struggle to make a living and to maintain a measure of dignity as rich summer people overrun his small town. The book's main character, Dick Pierce, is so knowledgeable about the coast and the sea that it's hard to believe Casey himself wasn't raised among fishermen. In fact, he is closer in class to the yachting types who threaten to reduce Pierce and his friends to caretakers and pets.

Casey's father, Joseph, was a lawyer and four-term congressman from Massachusetts; his mother, Constance Dudley, is a political activist who counts the early American poet Anne Bradstreet among her ancestors. Casey grew up in affluence in Washington, D.C., attending St. Albans prep school and later the elite Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland. Yet he did not always feel privileged. Until his teens, "I was a fat, short kid with a crew cut who stuttered," Casey recalls. Then, coming off the slopes with friends one afternoon in Switzerland, "I remember looking at the reflection in a plate-glass window and not being able to find myself," he says. "I saw this friend and that friend, but there was another fellow in a gray parka, and I didn't know who he was. He was tall and athletic. It was a real ugly duckling transformation after one year of playing ice hockey and skiing two hours a day and growing six inches."

Emotional maturity came more slowly. A bright but undisciplined student who had set a school record for demerits at St. Albans, Casey managed to get into Harvard and then to get thrown out, temporarily, during his sophomore year. "You weren't allowed to have girls in your room, and I violated that," he says. "Also I remember turning our dorm room into a sauna. You'd run the water very, very hot, then run out into the snow and frolic nude in the courtyard."

Casey spent six months in the Army before returning to finish college and begin law school. Though he was already writing short stories, he was still determined to follow his father into law and politics. "I was on a track," he says, "and writing was not on the track." Casey passed the Washington, D.C., bar in 1965 and briefly practiced with his father before deciding, as a diversion, to apply for a one-year fellowship at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. "I went, and soon I was pouring energy into writing in a way that was so intense I didn't think about the future," he says. One year turned into three, and Casey was hooked. With the proceeds of his first story sales, to the New Yorker and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, he and his wife, writer Jane Barnes, bought a four-acre island off Rhode Island.

There, for the next four years, Casey fished, farmed and wrote. "It's a wonderful balance," he says, "four hours of writing, then physical labor. I love digging postholes." He completed a novel, An American Romance (based on his time in Iowa), and a volume of short stories, Testimony and Demeanor. Both were well reviewed but quickly forgotten. He also, without really knowing it, completed the research for Spartina by getting to know the local fishermen. "There's a long period between when I live somewhere and when I write about it," says Casey. Divorced in 1980 from Barnes—the mother of his daughters Maud, 21, and Nell, 19—he now lives in Charlottesville, Va., with his second wife, artist Rosamond Pittman, and their daughter, Clare, 5. Since 1972, Casey has taught English at the University of Virginia. There, amid the horse farms and rolling hills, he wrote about the fishing life. "Some of the fishermen I knew were very, very smart," he says. "They can all run computers, and they've got to be good at seamanship, navigation and knowing where the fish are—which is part history, intuition and dreams. I was impressed by what a full life of the mind they have. And here they are living amid lots of yachtsmen who don't give them credit for what they're doing."

Spartina gives them their due and has now brought Casey much closer to his modest ambition—"to be well paid so I can live and to have my books read." He likes to joke that the National Book Award barely makes the grade in his overachieving family—his brother-in-law, Dr. Harold E. Varmus, just shared the Nobel Prize in medicine—but he seems to enjoy the attention. As for his stutter, "It still lurks there," he says. "It doesn't bother me in my normal life, but Good Morning America wanted me to go on live, and I said no. That anxiety I could do without."

'U.Va. Profiles' Features Award-Winning Author John Casey

by Jenny Gardiner

Dec. 10, 2007 — To sit down with noted author and U.Va. English professor John Casey is to hop in the car with the roof down on a sunny day and meander along a winding country road, destination unknown. A gifted raconteur, he weaves together anecdotes from his colorful past that incorporate family, colleagues and former students.

Born in 1939 in Worcester, Mass., into a large Irish-Catholic family, Casey counts among his ancestors two governors (one of whom granted the charter for Harvard College) and one chief justice of Massachusetts. His father Joseph served in the U.S. House of Representatives during the New Deal and worked in the Franklin Roosevelt White House.

“Don’t be a lawyer”

A kid who parlayed a passion for books into a prestigious career as an author, Casey spent his formative years in Washington, D.C., and in Europe. His Uncle Drew, who lived in Paris, persuaded Casey’s parents that their son would do well in the foreign service, and so he attended boarding school in Switzerland to learn French, the language of diplomacy. Casey returned for high school in Washington, attending the elite St. Albans School, where he got caught up in a sense of duty.

“At my school, the fathers of all of my friends were judges, lawyers, politicians or reporters. Washington was a one-industry town. I grew up thinking if you wanted to become a man, you had to perform a public service.”

As a Harvard University undergraduate, Casey studied Russian, planning the diplomatic career to which he felt fated. Instead he became smitten with drama, and for the first time a lifelong stutter was diminished dramatically while performing other people’s words. He eventually ended up at Harvard’s School of Law, where he first got an inkling that he’d missed his calling while taking a writing class taught by author Peter Taylor, who told Casey, “Don’t be a lawyer; be an author.”

Casey passed the D.C. bar, but Taylor’s advice haunted him. So he decided to attend the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he met some of the premier writers of the day, including John Irving, Gail Godwin and instructor Kurt Vonnegut, who remained a friend until his death in April 2007.

A decade later, Peter Taylor lured Casey to join the U.Va. faculty, where he made his mark professionally and fostered the careers of other writers, including protégé and godson Breece D’J Pancake, whose shocking 1979 suicide devastated Casey during a year of troubles in which his first marriage ended and his father died. He retreated to New England with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a bad case of writer’s block.....

............The honors for “Spartina” cascaded in: Casey received the National Book Award, a prestigious Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and then a residency at the American Academy in Rome. There, he met Linda Ferri, whose book he eventually translated into English.

“My brother’s publishing house had just bought the Italian rights to 'Spartina,'" Ferri recalled. "Late one rainy afternoon somebody rang the door of his office. When he opened the door, John appeared, smiling though completely wet, and said, ‘Hello, I’m John Casey. I know you bought my novel, and I wanted to meet you.’

"I don’t know of any Italian or European writer of big success who would do something like that — a way of being young that I am sure he will never lose. ”..........

.....Throughout his career, Casey has sought out new talent for the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. He is also known for going out of his way to help his students. English department colleague Deborah Eisenberg said, “John is such a strong presence that you tend to think of this big persona, like he’s the Errol Flynn of letters, but you’re not aware of much he does for other people and his kindness in regard to reading their work, helping with it, appreciating it. He is spectacularly generous.”

Casey’s generosity extends to reading manuscripts, helping students find agents and editors, "blurbing" former student’s books and nurturing raw talent.

“I am most proud of sniffing out talent,” Casey said. “It’s like the dogs and pigs who find truffles. You’ve got to get that little whiff. We’ve had great success with that here.”

Another department colleague, Christopher Tilghman, said that Casey deserves a lot of credit for where the U.Va. creative writing program stands today. “John’s been here since about the mid-'70s, and he’s been the one constant force on the fiction side of our MFA graduate program. I think the high ranking and the high regard that people hold our program in nationally is really a credit to the person who’s been here the longest.”

...........Casey continues to write his books in long-hand, and recently completed the yet-unnamed sequel to “Spartina.” “I write very slowly, and I have to have a goal. Sometimes it’s very hard to get there, and when I do, it’s sort of like a hoop you burst through,” he said. He writes in a spartan shed behind his home. “My shed is a shambles, pieces of paper, pipe cleaners everywhere. I’m up at the crack of dawn — 10 a.m.,” he said, tongue-in-cheek. “Writing is a little bit auto-hypnosis: once I go down there, clean the pipe, light it and then start thinking. Then words occur, very slowly, and there’s a point where it’s over, that’s it, you’re not in the zone any more. You might as well go row.”

Among Casey’s lifelong passions is rowing, which he did as a child and took up again at mid-life, becoming the faculty advisor for the U.Va. women’s rowing team. Much of his free time is spent paddling up and down the East Coast. “My brother-in-law and I decided we could canoe from our mother-in-law’s place in Pennsylvania all the way to my father’s house near Annapolis in six days. So we’re going to do it.”

Casey, who is married to noted artist Rosamund Casey and father to four daughters — two of whom write professionally — continues to write, teach and advocate for his students. He is determined to lobby for more funding for the Hoyns Fellowship to remain competitive with other MFA programs and bring in the best candidates to U.Va. He also plans to continue writing as long as he can.

“I suppose someday someone will come along and say, ‘Sorry, kid, you’ve lost it.’ That’s up there on the par with all the daughters leaving home — what a vacuum! I would rather be without writing than without children, but it’s a close-run race. I think I’d still write letters at least!

Ideas and Questions for Our Discussion. Please bring your own as well.

What do we find out about Dick Pierce during the first half of the book?

Who is he and what are the circumstances which have shaped him?

What do we learn about him as we observe his actions, and are allowed into his heart and his mind?

How is he with his wife May, and his two boys?

What are his feelings for them? Is he able to reveal his feelings to them?

How do supporting characters like Parker, Mary Scanlon, and Miss Perry help to flesh out Elsie and Dick??

Why are Elsie and Dick so drawn to each other?

How does their affair affect the direction of Dick's life?

Why does Dick love Spartina? What does the boat mean to him? Is this hard for us to understand?

Is there anything in our experience we can use to connect with Dick's love for his boat?

How do issues of social class, money, family, honesty, and adultery play out in the novel?

How you were affected by the scene when Dick takes his boat out into the sea?

Towards the end of the book, Dick begins to have some understanding of who he is. What events and people affect the change in his thinking? How?

Find some quotes from Dick that reveal his change in thinking.