Red Writer Launches Web Site

6-13-08, 11:51 am



Editor's Note: Phillip Bonosky is the author of many novels and non-fiction books, including Burning Valley, The Magic Fern, Afghanistan – Washington's Secret War, Brother Bill McKie, and others. Find out more about him and his work at .

PA: First of all I’d like to talk about your new website, and why you set it up?

PHILLIP BONOSKY: Well, we set it up because I have finished two books. I have a book on Alice Neal that maybe you saw some reference to, and I just finished a novel that I started out for my grandson, years ago, and I finally completed it – it’s called Iron Mountain. The first reaction from readers on the Web has been very positive, so I’m encouraged by that. But I am also at the moment working on two other books, which ought to be brought to some kind of conclusion within a foreseeable period. Beyond that, I have still other books. I am very much involved with getting things published now.

PA: Could you tell us something about your manuscripts? What would you like readers to know about them?

BONOSKY: I’m working on two books. One is – I hesitate to say it, because you immediately get the wrong reaction to it – reminiscences. It’s an autobiography. When I say autobiography, I’m sure there’s a kind of reaction. But it’s not going to be like that. It’s not going to be like that book that came into your mind. What I am going to do is this. For instance, I was born in 1916 and I was a Catholic of Lithuanian parents. I was born in Duquesne, PA a few miles away from Pittsburgh. Homestead was next to Duquesne, and that’s where I was christened, baptized, in the Catholic Church, right there across the tracks in Homestead. As a matter of fact, in 1916 the Steel Strike was soon to be, and before that there was the Homestead Strike. I knew one of the guys whose brother had actually been in that strike in 1892. But these things applied to me personally, forget about everything else. Forget about anything I believe in or do not believe in. The fact of the matter was that these strikes directly affected me.

Now I haven’t done heroic things. I haven’t done things that you write about. You know, I was in that battle on such and such a day. That’s not my sort of autobiography. What I decided to do was to make all of the past history of the working class part of my personal biography. In other words, instead of talking about the Homestead strike as something that happened at a distance, I would write about it as though I had experienced it – as if I was there and felt it. And I could feel it. I wanted to make it something different in terms of autobiography, and go through the events – all through the 20s and 30s – my work in the unemployed movement and in the CIO, working building the CIO in steel and so on and so forth, and finally getting into the intellectual world in New York City, and becoming whatever it is I became – and all the time always wanting to write. It was necessary to me.

I used to make a distinction some years past, when people would say – “Oh you did that, why did you do that?” I said, well, I don’t think that it was anything particular – I had to do it. I was always faced with the choice between what I must do and what I should do. I was very impressed by the fact that during the 30s there were people who, although they were well-to-do and there was no reason why they should, nevertheless thought that I had a right to be in a union. I thought, that’s nice of them! Now, as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t something I should do, it was something I had to do to survive. There was a difference. I made a distinction between what I had to do and what I should do. Although I admired what I should do and kept it as an ideal, I steered very close to what I had to do. And that has been more or less the case up through to this very day. I am doing what I have to do. I am writing books that I intended my whole life to write, not depending on passing moods.

People ask, well why do you write about the Thirties? Well I don’t write about the Thirties because of the Thirties, I write about phenomena which I am now completely master of, because I know the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. I feel completely in charge of it, and I can tell you everything about it. And that is the position I like to be in as a writer. That’s the position I am in the book I am writing now. It’s called Benedict. It stands as a kind of sequel to Burning Valley, but it stands alone. I have taken the situation of the struggle inside the Catholic Church between the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, and the necessities of the workers who are members of the Church, and what happens there, and how it shows itself on the public scene. So that’s the book. Now I know it, all of it. I know the beginning of it, I know the growth of it, and I know the end of it, and I’m writing about it with total authority, and nobody else has the same authority that I have of that phenomenon. So I’m in a good position.

Now the other thing I’m doing is directly autobiographical, but also with these caveats, these extenuations that I have been explaining to you – about religion, for instance. How religion manifests itself in the working class and what the working class actually is in reality. Why is it that in America today, you put on the television and they talk about the middle class? The working class has magically disappeared. Millions of people have suddenly disappeared overnight. There’s no working class. It’s all middle class. I said, no, no, no. When I came out of the mill with those dirty clothes and tired to death, I wasn’t in any middle class, I was in the working class. That’s the key – the working class. It wasn’t because I was pushing a pencil, it was because I was doing hard work. That is what all the people in my town, most of them anyway, were doing. You have to assert that, not in any kind of limited way, but as a fact of life, and one that they are trying to eliminate. I think it should be resisted. The idea of the working class should not be allowed to be eliminated. We should not accept the fact that the ideal of American society is to establish middle class standards. We shouldn’t allow that to happen.

PA: Well, it sounds to me as though your memoirs might be, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, an “autobiography of a class.”

BONOSKY: Yes, something like that. I don’t want to aspire to anything quite as sonorous-sounding as that, but more or less like that. That’s what I am doing. These two manuscripts are accumulating and eventually they’ll be books, just like the first one which I started out as a book for my grandson, which is now a novel. I decided I’d make it not just for my grandson, but more of a general book. So I’m in business, you see. I have very little patience with any theories which limit the struggle for what is basically human emancipation – to be a human being. I don’t accept any of that. I won’t until the day I die, which may not be terribly long from now.

PA: About the website – there are already a couple of essays there on various subjects. Can people who are going to visit the website expect to find new things coming up? How is that going to work?

BONOSKY: What will happen is that in a few weeks, a couple of weeks at most, I will have finished the opening section of the novel I am working on now, Benedict, so that it can stand by itself, and then I am going to put that up on the website. It won’t be complete; it will be about 30 pages and we’ll put up considerably less than that. But by reading it, you’ll get an idea of what I have in mind, and if I’m doing it right, it will be unique. It will be different. I will have evaded the banality of telling it like I was born on such and such a day, my parents were such and such; I did this, I did that; we went to school, and all that kind of thing. I will have evaded all that, and I hope that what I put in its place is much more meaningful than it would have been otherwise.

PA: The website also has a place for people to contact you?

BONOSKY: My daughter, who is the editor of the whole thing, is going to put up the details about how readers can send in e-mails in just a few days, and then it will be possible to write to me by e-mail.