INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Gonzalez James by Lauren C. Johnson
Five Conversations
About Peter Sellers
Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Texas Review Press
Interview by
Lauren C. Johnson
I’d never heard of the late actor Peter Sellers or Casino Royale, a bombastic 1967 spy-spoof film, until I picked up Elizabeth Gonzalez James’s essay chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (Texas Review Press, March 2023). Though spy movies—campy or otherwise— have never been my thing, I was familiar with author Gonzalez James and her smart and witty debut novel, Mona at Sea (Santa Fe Writers’ Project, June 2021). And, if Gonzalez James had something to say about Peter Sellers, I knew I should listen.
I’m so glad I did.
Five Conversations About Peter Sellers covers much more than the actor’s biography or how he wreaked havoc on the set of Casino Royale. Through humor, meticulous research, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, Gonzalez James explores her own fascination with Peter Sellers and what it means to be obsessed with a forgotten ‘60’s film star in the 2020’s.
Readers who know Gonzalez James’s work know that she is very, very good at voice. This essay is no exception. In fact, her exploration unfolds through the voices of five narrators—a metaphor for the author conversing and arguing with herself. Five Conversations is therefore a hybrid essay and script. This innovative structure, voice, and tone are the tools Gonzalez James employs to get beneath the surface of complex issues, including identity, misogyny, and race.
After I finished reading Five Conversations, I found myself Googling Peter Sellers, grooving to this fantastic Spotify playlist, and queuing up Casino Royale. Admittedly, I didn’t make it past the first 30 minutes—it is a chaotic movie—but I’ll give it another go. In the meantime, I know I’ll be thinking about Five Conversations About Peter Sellers for a long time to come.
Eager for more insights, I contacted Gonzalez James for an email interview. We talked about following one’s artistic instincts, being typecast, self-actualization in the age of TikTok, Mad Men, the concept of grace, and whether Gonzalez James ever figured out her deal with Peter Sellers.
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Lauren C. Johnson: First and foremost, I adore this chapbook. I think anything is possible in the hands of the right author, and Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is a lesson in following and honoring your literary obsessions.
I’m curious, how did your friends and family react when you told them you were doing a deep dive on Peter Sellers and Casino Royale? There are a lot of naysayers out there, so I’m wondering if anyone tried to discourage you or tell you no one would be interested in this essay? How did you overcome any doubts and move forward?
Elizabeth Gonzalez James: Thanks so much for your kind words, and I’m really glad to hear you tried to watch the movie. I want to say it gets better after the first thirty minutes but that depends on your definition of better. I think the set design and costumes are fantastic, and they certainly get more impressive as the film goes on.
As to your question about whether I had any naysayers…possibly? Probably? I had originally wanted to write some slick Esquire-style profile on Peter Sellers. Then March 2020 happened, and my memory gets a little hazy at that point. My kids were home, my husband was home, we were alone and trying to do Zoom school and everything from that spring is a blur.
But as I started to make sense of the world again, I realized that I didn’t want to write a slick Esquire-style essay. I wanted to write something else. And when I started working on it, I think my husband probably voiced some doubts. He wanted me to finish writing my second novel, and so when I would get distracted with my little flights of fancy, he would gently say something like, “That sounds cool. Maybe you can hold onto that and come back to it when you’re done with the novel.” But I never listen.
I feel like the pandemic and lockdown had something to do with me feeling free enough to experiment with this book. Everything was so uncertain in 2020 that I felt like, “Why not write a loopy chapbook about an actor I don’t even really like and who is rapidly sliding into cultural irrelevance?”
My first novel was under contract, due to be released in 2021, but with the upheavals going on in 2020—shipping delays, layoffs, paper shortages, presses closing, distribution problems, issues at the post office— there wasn’t a guarantee that the publishing industry would survive the pandemic. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic— things were dire. Lilly Dancygar captured all of those feelings perfectly in an essay she published in Electric Literature. So, when it felt like there were no stakes because there was no guarantee that anything would survive, that was a morbidly creative place to be.
As to overcoming doubts, I think that anyone doing anything creative has to have a willfully ignorant optimism, at least in the beginning. Without the unfounded belief that the project is worthwhile, they wouldn’t keep attacking it day after day. But I also just think I have good instincts for what will work and what’s worth my while, and I’ve learned to listen to them.
LCJ: Throughout your chapbook, you ask, “What is my deal with Peter Sellers?” While the author is fascinated with unpacking her fixation on Peter Sellers, as a reader, I’m fascinated with unpacking the structure of your chapbook.
The five narrators, of course, represent a conversation the author is having with herself. But I also think that introducing five narrators mirrors the wild, multi-threaded structure of Casino Royale itself. The essay also reads like a script. Then, in the Creative Non-Fiction podcast, you mention that your first artistic love was choir. That got me thinking that there’s a choral aspect to this structure too.
So, I’m wondering, how did you land on five narrators? Did this form surface through revision or did the speakers present themselves to you intuitively? Did you intentionally draw inspiration from the performing arts?
EGJ: I had never made the connection to choir or a choral voice in the essay. Now you’ve got me wondering if I could do some sort of polyphonic writing—many complementary voices at once. Or what about singing aloud a novel or essay? In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the entire film is sung in recitative, meaning that it follows the patterns of speech rather than a verse, chorus, verse, chorus setup that a traditional musical would follow. You’ve just opened a whole new part of my brain, so thank you! You see what I mean about following my little flights of fancy?
I arrived at the number five because Casino Royale had five directors, each following their own thread. The film isn’t exactly episodic, but it also doesn’t really follow a cohesive plot either. I was noodling around with the essay, not sure what I was going to do with it or say in it, and then I remember being in my dining room and just thinking, “What if I wrote it in conversation? What if I had five narrators?”
Once I had this thought, it just felt right. I started writing the different characters, and right away, I thought they should pop out of my head like little Power Rangers—each their own distinct thing, but able to combine into a bigger thing, a mecha-Elizabeth as it were. Each narrator has their own agenda— Elle wants to report the facts, Izzy wants to spill tea, Abby wants to get into a feminist dialogue, and Beth is trying to construct a meta-narrative. Elizabeth is just trying to keep up with the circus and sort out her own thoughts.
Five narrators also gave me the opportunity to chase lots of ideas at once—something producer Charles K. Feldman wanted to do in Casino Royale—which meant that I got to keep all my darlings.
LCJ: Do you think Five Conversations About Peter Sellers might be in conversation with your debut novel, Mona at Sea? I’m not trying to compare Peter Sellers with Mona Lisa Mireles; after learning about Sellers, I agree he was a despicable, abusive person. But I do see some overlapping themes in both books. Peter Sellers had hopes and dreams about his acting career that never took off. Mona Mireles had expectations for her career that crashed and burned after the Great Recession.
Could you speak to some of the themes that reoccur in your fiction and non-fiction?
EGJ: That’s an interesting connection between the two books and is one I’d never made. I thought there might be a connection between them regarding fame. Mona is reluctantly famous for appearing in a viral video and Sellers is a movie star. But your theory makes a lot more sense.
I’m interested in characters who feel like they don’t belong, and this has really obvious parallels to me being half-Mexican and half-white. But I’m also becoming interested in characters who know what their problem is, but who feel like they can’t do anything to address it.
I feel like fiction was for a long time concerned with characters, particularly women, who were looking for a diagnosis, a reason why they felt so unfulfilled or lonely or depressed. Charles Baxter wrote an essay about this called “Dysfunctional Narratives or: ‘Mistakes Were Made.’” He calls them therapeutic narratives. My thinking is that enough of us have been to therapy at this point, and society seems to have a pretty good general knowledge of pop psychology, so that it doesn’t really feel interesting to read something where the character wants to find the cause of their affliction. It feels more real to life, in my opinion, for a character to know exactly the root cause of their suffering, but to lack the skills or the drive to address it. That fascinates me as a writer.
Peter Sellers felt he had no substance to him: no there there. He was probably right. There probably was no there there. But what does a person do about that? Stumps me. A person possessing a reasonably good amount of self-knowledge who’s still self-destructing or falling into predictable patterns is a rich source of drama.
Grace is another pet interest of mine, and I address it at the end of the chapbook. Marilynne Robinson got me thinking about grace after I read Gilead, and I haven’t let go of the preoccupation. Grace for me is like a little bit of God that we hold inside us, offering love and compassion to someone even when they don’t deserve it. Maybe especially when they don’t deserve it. Grace appears in this chapbook, in my second novel, The Bullet Swallower, and in my third novel that I’m currently writing.
LCJ: One of my favorite passages in Five Conversations is about Peter Sellers’s appearance on The Muppet Show in 1978. Sellers tells Kermit the Frog “I could never be myself… You see, there is no me. I do not exist… There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.”
Sellers was certainly someone who was typecast. Do you see his story as a kind of cautionary tale to artists (or anyone really) about what happens when you let other people decide who you are?
EGJ: Yes probably. It’s sort of a Hollywood cliché, isn’t it? That someone wants fame and adulation so badly that they’ll let themselves be used by the industry and made into a fool. But it’s also part of the evolution of performers; look at Justin Bieber circa 2010 singing “Baby” and then look at him today with “Peaches.” Really successful performers, even if they started out singing pre-fab bubblegum hits, will grow into a position of being able to express themselves through their medium.
Now why Peter Sellers was unable to do this is debatable. For one thing I don’t think he had the dramatic talent he thought he did. But he was also fighting studios at a time when they were incredibly rigid.
Today we can accept that Adam Sandler can be great in Happy Gilmore and Uncut Gems, but a few generations ago that was difficult for studio bosses to grasp. But Peter Sellers did get a redemption of sorts in Being There. He gives an undeniably brilliant performance in that film. He’s so good in that role it’s almost painful to watch.
His character, Chance the gardener, is an intellectually and emotionally stunted man raised by television who, because of his almost total lack of human interaction, has no ability to be fully human. It’s a profoundly depressing setup even if the film is a comedy. So, he was certainly typecast, but I think it’s debatable whether he had a choice.
LCJ: To that point, Elizabeth, one of the five narrators, states that as a bi-ethnic person, she knows what it feels like to have other people project an identity onto her. Could you elaborate more about your own experiences feeling typecast, either in your personal life or as an artist? And how do you push back against other people’s assumptions and definitions?
EGJ: Yes, the bi-ethnic thing is tricky. I look white. I mean, I look really white, haha. No one would ever guess I was Mexican in a million years. But I am Mexican, ethnically and culturally. I grew up in Laredo, Texas where I could literally walk to Mexico from my house. But because I look white, I feel sometimes like I have to prove that I’m Mexican. I make tamales from scratch. I listen to cumbia music. I wear embroidered tops I bought in Mexico City. Like, who am I trying to impress? There’s no grand council of Latinx people that’s going to approve my application for cultural citizenship. But it feels important nonetheless.
I had a big realization a few years after I got married that no one would know I was Mexican unless I told them. I took my husband’s last name, James, without giving it any thought. But a few years into the marriage, I realized that I’d let go of the one external cue that I’m Mexican – my maiden name. And then I felt really weird, because I worried that I’d shut the door on my ancestors or robbed my children and grandchildren of an opportunity to be Mexican. So that was when I decided to start writing under the name, Elizabeth Gonzalez James. It’s to give myself a sort of redo of the decision to take my husband’s name, but it’s also a signal to readers. If Elizabeth James is writing about Mexican characters and making assertions about the Mexican-American experience, readers are gonna say, “Where does this lady get off?” But if Elizabeth Gonzalez James does it, then that’s (maybe) a different conversation.
My friend (and enormously talented poet) Jay Ward once shared with me something called the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, which asserts, among other things, my right to not have to justify how I identify to others, and to not feel responsible for other people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity. This document was so transformational for me, as I’d often felt like I needed to apologize for my existence or at least apologize for my appearance. Sometimes I still do, honestly, when I get flustered face-to-face with someone who makes an insensitive comment. But I try to keep the tenets of the bill of rights at the top of my mind and then just live my life and continue being good and helpful in the world.
LCJ: So, believe it or not, I’m currently watching the Mad Men series for the very first time. Reading Five Conversations right now feels serendipitous because both your chapbook and the series explore the 1960’s social norms that produced very self-involved white men. I’ve felt disgust watching Don Draper, and I certainly felt disgust toward Peter Sellers.
I guess this is more of a comment than a question, but I think that disgust is part of the point, no? I feel like much of this despicable behavior comes from living in a society with such rigid gender norms; in the 1960’s there were only so many ways to “be a man.” What do you think?
EGJ: I love Mad Men, so I’m glad to hear you’re watching it. I will say that disgust is not the word that comes to mind when I look at Jon Hamm, no matter which character he’s playing, haha. But yes, I think the showrunners definitely chose that world and that time period for the purpose of showing us how we got to where we are now. Those guys still run the show.
Karl Marx says redistribution of wealth doesn’t work to address the problems inherent in capitalism. I’m going to extrapolate that to also include redistribution of power and opportunity. This is why one of the characters in the chapbook says “[Women] need more seats at the table,” and another character shoots that down and says we need to burn the tables and start over. I sort of agree.
Over the last 20 years I’ve seen this country take one step forward and two steps back. We elect Obama only to follow him with Trump. We finally get a Black woman on the Supreme Court and then the conservative majority overturns Roe v. Wade. I realize “burn it all down” is not a viable governing strategy, but what we’re currently doing isn’t working either.
And as to gender norms, yes, in the ‘60s there was only one way to be a man. Heck, in the ‘90s when I was a teenager that was still the case. Things are changing and getting better in some parts of the country and things are staying the same or getting worse in other parts of the country. I will say that the teenagers I’ve met over the last 10 years have been incredibly thoughtful, smart, kind, articulate, globally-minded, and considerate of others. I was a small-minded, selfish moron when I was a teenager, so these kids all seem like little Greta Thunbergs to me. But it’s wonderful. They give me hope.
LCJ: To that point, if Peter Sellers had been a millennial or Gen Z, do you think he might have had an easier time defining who he was for himself? As millennials, this is sort of our thing, right? For better or for worse, we know what it means to build your own “personal brand.” He could have created and dropped his own content on TikTok or YouTube.
Or, do you think he still would have been someone who was primarily motivated by fame and gotten swept up in the old Hollywood machinery, never to self-actualize?
EGJ: It’s a hard question to answer. I think plenty of young people fail to self-actualize despite the fact they could be anyone they want to be, especially if they live in a place where the community encourages self-exploration. But I think this has a lot to with the presence of our phones more than anything else. It’s a 24/7 distraction machine. You never have to be bored ever again, not even for a few seconds. And I think growth happens when we’re bored, when we’re just puttering around aimlessly, when we’re forced to sit uncomfortably with ourselves and our messy thoughts. Would Peter Sellers have been the sort of young person who could put down his phone and experience life without the dopamine drip of social media validation? Doubtful.
And I’m doubtful that the concept of a “personal brand” bears much resemblance to a person’s actual self anyway. Jia Tolentino has much better articulated thoughts on this than I do, but a brand is all artifice and projection. So no, I’m not sure Sellers could have articulated his actual self onto TikTok any better than he could in film. I think he’d still be pulling faces, doing voices, playing to the folks in the back.
LCJ: You mentioned that you first read Peter Sellers’s biography as research when you were writing a character in your second novel. Do you think Peter Sellers eventually taught you how to write that character?
EGJ: In some ways, yes. That character was reduced a lot over subsequent revisions – he went from being 50% of the novel to maybe 10%. But I think that reading so much about Peter Sellers made me see what sort of a person I did not want in my book. I realized that my character’s problem was very different from Peter Sellers’ problem, though it was good for me to be able to make that distinction and to home in on what my character’s dilemmas were.
LCJ: By the end of the book, do you hope your readers figure out your deal with Peter Sellers? Or do you hope we find satisfaction lingering in the ellipses?
EGJ: I think readers could draw a number of different conclusions about what my deal is with Peter Sellers, although I’m also comfortable having them linger in the ellipses as you put it.
A novel should be a complete story, right? A short story, too. A short story should show the moment something changes irrevocably and should end at a point where a reader has a reasonable expectation as to what will happen next. But an essay doesn’t necessarily work like that. An essay is an interrogation. The word essay comes from the Old French, essai, meaning “trial.” Essays are a way to test what we think and feel about a given subject.
A good essay puts our ideas on trial to see if they stand up to the laws of logic and the rigor of language. I think this chapbook is certainly a trial. The outcome is for readers to decide. I have presented a number of arguments and whether they aggregate to form some sort of meta meaning is, of course, what I hoped to accomplish, but will ultimately depend on the reader. It’s a tricky thing with writing. The reader adds the last piece. I can only go so far. If I gave you all the pieces it wouldn’t be art, it would be something else.
