“The Majestic westward-flowing river went without a name for millions of years, but for nearly four thousand years she was called Wimah, Big River, by the first immigrants to her shores. Since 113 years before Aino’s arrival, she has been called the Columbia.” — from the novel Deep River

***

Deep River, the 2020 novel by Karl Marlantes, is located in the territory around Astoria at the time his Finnish kin arrived to settle, working as loggers, fishermen, farmers.  

 Aino, the novel’s fierce middle sister, and her two brothers escape the imperial violence of Russian oppressors and make their way to Deep River, twelve miles by river east of its mouth on Willapa Bay.

Marlantes takes you by the hand and shoulder and leads you into the tale, and days go by and you’re living with this family and the times they went through and it’s now and I’m living here, in this place, imagining the history I live with, looking across the mighty river to the state of Washington, where settlements grew and now clear-cuts that speak to the end game, all around me, in the soil, in the flow of the river. I drive to the places in the book, that have other names, but are located on a map.

Marlantes’ people were from Naselle, not a good title for a book, so he chose Deep River, up the road, which in fact, is a deep river, and the giant logs from the great forests would flow down those waters to the market. His descriptions of life at the logging camps, the physical labor, the machines, the dangers, the brutal conditions of the loggers, the tenacity and ingenuity of the people working to survive, the dances in the Finnish halls, the interior lives and struggles between love and justice and power, all come to life in his cinematic reconstruction of history.

Karl Marlantes is coming to Astoria as a keynote speaker at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18, and workshop leader the following day at the Astoria Writers Guild Festival Oct. 18, 19, and 20.  In our phone conversations, I ask him about history, memory, place, and power.

***

Susan: The real issues that this book brings forward—issues of class, race, labor, capitalism—it’s all now. 

Karl: That’s absolutely right. That was absolutely conscious.

S: You are such an action-oriented, physical storyteller. Did you study acting?

K: No, I studied economics. At Yale you had to declare your major. I had an English class that freshman year and just loved English literature, all the greats. I remember late at night thinking, you’ll never make a living with this. I chose economics, and I did make a living, because I had an economics degree.

I was a strategic planner, marketing strategy, industry strategy. I had a consulting firm and was all over the globe, involved in restructuring big giant electric systems, like the Russian system. When Russia collapsed, I was over there. A corporation that made batteries and power supplies. It was headquartered in Singapore, but we had factories from Pakistan to New Zealand. My life was very unartistic. I’ve never been to a writer’s class or a writing school.

S: You shift the action, like a cinematographer. What movies inspired you?

K: Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, these incredible panoramic scenes, landscape, characters. I love The Godfather, an all-time great study of power. I like Eric Rohmer, French new wave. His films are subtle studies of classic French culture and human nature.

S: From the epic to the personal. When did you know you wanted to write Deep River? When did you hear call, feel the quake?

K:  I learned about the Kalevala when I was a kid. Half of my family was Finnish. But I’d never read it until I was at Oxford and I was in a class—only Oxford would have a class like this—it was called Old Norse Poetic Diction—and there, along with the Norse sagas, I picked up the Kalevala translations. It spoke to me. It struck me. The Kalevala isn’t a story. It is a series of old songs, shamanic songs.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to write a saga, like Laxdaela Saga, about the founding of a Viking village in Iceland. I wondered if you could bring the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, into modern times—the founding of a village in North America by the same kinds of people. That was in the late ’80s. Of course, I had other things to do. I couldn’t get published with [his novel] Matterhorn and I had five kids and had to earn a living. Finally, when Matterhorn sold and I paid the mortgage off, then I had time to write this other book that had been on my mind for twenty years.

Another thing was, I woke up one morning, way earlier, when I was a young man. I had an image of my grandmother sitting in her house in Astoria, looking at the Columbia River. A very strong image. I began to wonder about Grandma’s life. She was born in 1889, and she’d seen people go to the moon. That’s an amazing life. And that stuck in my mind for decades.

S: So that was probably the root image.

K: Yes, that was, I think, the root image.

S: The way you set up the end, with two old people face to face, holding a hand and a shoulder, singing the Kalevala into each other. So powerful.

K: I saw that. When I was really little, about five or six years old. I was with my great uncle in Naselle, 1950, a very strong Finnish community there. We were at some gathering and these two old guys started doing that.

S: It’s like a forgotten language of direct transmission, ancient storytelling.

K: It left a deep impression.

S: Who is Aino to you? Why did you choose her as your main character?

K: I had the image of my grandmother in my mind. Aino is a character from the Kalevala. The way I look at writing—this sound pretentious but it isn’t pretentious—if you’re doing it right, it’s a spiritual practice. And for men, finding their inner female figures is important to their development as complete humans. I purposely chose a female figure. Writing Deep River wasn’t easy. I have three daughters and a wife, and every once in a while, I’d show them something and get an eyeroll. So, it was good for me.  And I have to admit, 80 percent of people who buy fiction in America are female.

S: Strategic planning.

K: Exactly.

S: Aino brings to life the hidden history of female power in the healing arts. Women did the midwifery, birthed the babies, took care of the abortions. They were labor organizers, strikers, brides, businesswomen, mothers. The book is also a political history of the labor unions.

K: Today we’ve forgotten that a great deal of where we are as a society is because of the labor movement. The weekend. There was no such thing as a weekend. Striking for straw. That’s true. My great-uncle said that was the first strike he participated in.

The loggers wanted clean straw for their bunks. The owner shows up with a .44 caliber lever-action Winchester.

From Deep River: “’Unless you’re all at work in one hour, I’ll fire every one of you.’ Toivo walked form the crowd, picking up some straw. ‘We’re asking you to being treated with some respect.’ He tossed the straw into the air and it fell to the ground in a clump. ‘We wanting clean straw and a part-time bull cook. We not asking for more.’”

K: That was only 100 years ago. We forget. Unions keep the wealth distribution more equitable. Reder (the owner) is a capitalist. He’s not evil. He’s part of a system. It’s the combination that has gotten us here. It’s the combination that gets us ahead. For instance, at the dance. The symbolism of the male and female together instead of fighting each other. It’s the harmony in the coming together. I was very conscious of that as a symbol. The same with labor and capital.

S: Who talks about the labor movement? It’s not taught in history classes anymore.

K: What is taught in history these days? I asked my daughter about her American History class. Have you gotten to the Vietnam War?  No. Is it going to be taught? I don’t think so. I asked the principal and she said, Oh no, it’s far too controversial.

S: Here we are in Astoria and the timber industry is a bunch of Wall Street firms. They don’t give a crap about the workers or community or climate change, most of all. These are some of the last forests on earth that sequester carbon monoxide, and the industry mows them down for profit.

K: All they see are the numbers. I’ve been in that world. They look at spreadsheets. I don’t think they’ve ever come out to see a tree go down. Yes, it’s efficient. But efficient doesn’t mean soulful. Efficient doesn’t mean fair. Removed from reality, the same way people are. I’m here in Cannon Beach right now, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and people are walking up and down the beach looking at their cell phones. Everything is digitized. Everything is removed.

There are very efficient capitalist systems—Finland, Denmark—people have health care, people have time off when their babies come, we can do it. It’s been done. We went down a rat hole here. Instead of seeing people who have a different idea about the American experiment, now they’re the enemy. Hegel, thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. That’s the way you move forward. Everything you read—spiritual books—it’s always about the balance. We’ve lost it.

We had labor laws. We had banking laws. We had Roe v. Wade. A friend of mine said, Karl, the Republicans get in there and fight. They scrap. And the Democrats hire the people who won the participation trophies when they were kids. You think of the Democrats in the ’30s and ’40s, they were the robust fighters.

The only way forward is consciousness. My image of that is, OK, there’s writers, artists, dancers, there’s the Queen Mary, massive….mrrrrr….moving forward…..mrrrr….and you’ve got the artists on the bow with a 30 hp outboard … vr,vr,vr, vr….  The only thing I can say is you’ve got a vector. And eventually that bow will move. We won’t see it. Progress happens. I’m a Buddhist that way.

S: Speaking of Buddhism, could you say more about Sisu? The energy state you call forth in several of your chapters. I think of mindfulness, ki energy, core/pelvic engagement. If you were teaching me how to access my sisu, what would you say?

K: It’s built into you from the time you were a child. I asked my grandmother once to define it. What do you think Sisu is? She said, “It’s what beat the Russians in the winter war.” It’s spoken of as something you find, like, where is your sisu? You have to reach down and grab it. It’s not like an attitude. It’s different than bravery or stubbornness. Those are psychological traits. The way the Finns talk about sisu, it’s a real thing. It’s what beat the Russians in the winter war. A lot of cultures have that. I don’t know about today because Finland is a modern Nordic country. I’ve been there, but I haven’t lived there. In the culture I grew up in, it was still the old style. Finnish was a common language in the shops. You couldn’t get hired as a retail clothing clerk if you didn’t speak either Norwegian or Finnish. You had to be able to speak to your customers. Astoria now, two-thirds of the town wasn’t even born there.

S: How did you get from a logging community to Yale, an elite, class-based educational institution?

K: This is a good story, it takes a while if you’ve got time

(He wins a scholarship to Yale, which he knows nothing about. He’s taking the advice of his big brother, who tells him to go to college in the East.)

K: There was going to be a Freshman welcome party at Jonathan Edwards College, the one I was assigned to. I knew what a welcome party was because my brother had gone to college, so I put on my black Converse all-star tennis shoes and Bermuda shorts and sweatshirt and headed out to the college to find out where the keg was going to be. And when I got there, there were tables with white tablecloths and Black men with red blazers serving things, one of which was called a martini. I had never had a martini in my life. Maybe two beers in my life. All these guys were standing around with blue blazers and castles on their loafers, and I thought what the fuck.

I asked the African American gentleman, what’s in a martini? He said gin and vermouth. Well, I knew what gin was. I’d never heard of vermouth. So, I said, I’ll have one. People were holding out their elbows to the side holding their glasses, and I thought, I can do that. So, I’m standing there and no one is talking to me and I thought, that tastes pretty good, I’ll have another one. I had four martinis. And Margaret, who was the Master’s wife. His name was Deekman Cannon Junior and Margaret was the daughter of the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. She came over to me and says, ‘Oh, you must be Mr. Marlantes then, the one from up in the corner.’ I’m standing there looking at her, with my elbow in the air, and I’m drunk, and as I’m talking to her, my elbow goes down and spills the martini right down her bosom and I passed out. I woke up in my dorm. Someone had carried me back.

S: Welcome to Yale. I guess your world view did change.

K: Yeah, my world view changed. 

S: What did your parents do?

K: My dad was a high school teacher. My mom waited tables and did bookkeeping. She was the real brains in the family, but she left school when she was fourteen, so she didn’t get an education.

S: What did your dad teach?

K: Commercial law, geography, algebra, and world history.

S: The enterprising esprit that entered your consciousness. The roots of things. Where we are rooted. The place. This land at the mouth of the Columbia, where your parents, your grandparents built a life—where your memory was born, the way you flow as a storyteller, the confidence. I don’t mean that egotistically. A kind of trust.

K: When I tell a story, it comes from my experience. My stories and my writing come out of some other place than this current time. I’m much more mythologically oriented. Stuff comes from dreams. As far as the Spirit is concerned, whatever you call it, the world view of the Spirit is vast, has seen the dark ages come and go. We evolved from the savannas of Africa, and moved from there.

S: That’s probably why I feel at home in Africa (recent trip), standing out there on the savannas.

K: That’s because of who you are. Other people would go there and say, this is a good place to grow coffee.

S: Yes, right. Thank you, Karl. I will see you soon at the Liberty Theatre in Astoria.

From Deep River: “He walked to Deep River with her and stood at her side looking across to Ilmahenki and the smoke from the stove where Alma made breakfast for his children and he was filled with longing to cross the river and join them.” 

***

Writers Guild of Astoria Creative Writing Festival

• Where: Liberty Theater, Columbian Theater, Fort George Brewery, and Hotel Elliott in downtown Astoria.
• When: Friday-Sunday, Oct. 18-20.
• Schedule/details: Creative Writing Festival.
• Karl Marlantes at the festival: Keynote speech, 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18 (doors open at 6 p.m.), Liberty Theatre. Leading “Writing from History” workshop, 10:45-11:45 Saturday, Oct. 19, Liberty Theatre.
• Other writers and performers at the festival: Mary Delea, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, Harvest Moon, Alyssa Graybeal, Susan Banyas (author of this story), Emily Ransdell.
• YouTube recording by KMUN radio of Pultzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown’s speech to Astoria Writers Guild in 2021.