Q: |
At what point did you decide to write about the letters, and why? |
A: |
I decided to write about the letters when I realized that there was a narrative, a story to be told. This was confirmed for me not so much by the letters I found, but by additional information about Gene and Phyllis Chaikin supplied by both the FBI files and by Fielding McGehee and Prof. Rebecca Moore at the Jonestown Institute, who indicated to me that the couple had been significant in the hierarchy of Peoples Temple.
For me, the narrative crux of the article was the divergent paths taken by two individuals who had previously been united in almost all of their values and decisions. In response to Jones’ influence, one individual attempts to extricate his children from danger, and the other topples into fanaticism. |
Q: |
How did you research the piece? |
A: |
I researched the article first by consulting with McGehee and Moore, who are the preeminent scholars of Peoples Temple and whose Web site is an indispensible hub for all serious study of the subject. They helped me with a reading list, and Internet book sellers did the rest. I collected about fifteen books on Peoples Temple, most of them long out of print, and read them all.
I then tracked down many survivors and family members, many but not all of whom were willing to talk to me. Most of these had known Phyllis and Gene Chaikin very well. Above all, the massive FBI files were an invaluable source of primary testimony and research. |
Q: |
An earlier version of "From Silver Lake to Suicide" appeared in Britain's The Spectator last May. The structure you chose for the LA Weekly article seems more narrative and storylike. In what ways did you approach the piece differently the second time around? |
A: |
Even at 3200 words, my article was long by the standards of The Spectator, and I was inhibited in the area of storytelling by several factors: I had not yet researched Gene’s “walkabout” and other aspects of the narrative in enough detail, the constraints on length were inhibiting, and I was too cowed into formality by The Spectator’s august reputation as a serious journal of thought (entirely my own fault, not theirs).
Earlier versions of The Spectator piece were trying too hard to be pseudo-academic, and with the help of a few friends—some of them writers—it began to penetrate my thick skull that I had to acknowledge the narrative identity of the story and not get in its way with superfluous comment and pompous theorizing. Also, I must acknowledge the contribution made by an extremely good editor at LA Weekly, Tom Christie, who encouraged me, amongst other things, to make much more extensive use of quotations from the letters themselves. I had underestimated their heft in the telling of the story. |
Q: |
Are you still planning a book? |
A: |
Yes, but I do not want to write yet another “Jonestown book.” A first I thought the key to the book was finding an umbilical connection between radical politics of the 1950s and “New Religion” of the 1970s, but I’m less confident of this now and believe I’d be straying too far away from the main narrative thread of the article, which is its strength, and too far towards sociology.
My biggest enthusiasm for the book is to get into the relationship between two intertwined notions, of “Family” and “Society,” concepts that are viewed very differently at different extremes of political and cultural opinion. However, to do this and yet keep the thing both narrative-driven and personal, I’d have to have unfettered access to the intimate family histories of both the Alexander and Chaikin families, and especially to Gene’s, Phyllis’s, Gail’s and David’s family life both pre- and post-Peoples Temple. I do have some wonderful sources but have not achieved critical mass in this regard.
I’m wondering whether to toy with a hybrid concept of fact and responsible fictional “embroidery,” like Capote or Delillo. However, this is a very ambitious remit indeed and involves the lives of people who may not wish to become chess pieces in such a literary experiment. So…I’m a little stymied. What I do know for sure is that this story, for me, is not about Jonestown but about the intimate mysteries of family and the dynamic relationship of Family and Society. It’s about the mysterious “ties that bind,” about being someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s brother, and about Phyllis Chaikin’s doomed quest for a father figure. |