On the Beach…Summer Reading

 

 

 

New York Daily News 1954

 

 

It appears I have lost the fire in my belly as the media attention to the well -worn rubric  ‘summer reading’ has come and gone> And unlike times past,  I have not excoriated the whole damn herd of literary commentators for this vacuous listicle-inducing category. Despite years of an inability to take seriously this meaningless category, it is clear that my meager efforts to staunch this yearly silliness have failed.

 

So, I am joining the herd … with some modification. While I am certain that my recommendation can be read on the beach and/or during the summer. I also positive that they can be read, in the bathroom, while waiting interminably at the Motor Vehicle Bureau (or at any government agency) or basically anywhere  there is ample light and a place to plant oneself out of the fray

 

 

 

 

 

The Force- Don Winslow

This new offering by Winslow may replace his important epic novel The Power of The Dog (and the sequel The Cartel) as his magnum opus. Set for the most part in that other country, the US-Mexican border such was its vivid depiction of the spider’s web of worldwide complicity in the so-called War on Drugs much like any good John LeCcarre story there is an abundance of truth packed into this fiction. In the new opus, Winslow has focused his ample powers of observation and narrative skills on the workings of and the psyches and pathologies of an array of characters of the New York Police Department— kind of  Prince of the City on steroids. When I received my copy I  was vexed by what I saw as blatant hyperbole best selling by thriller writer “Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearian in its epic sweep – probably the best cop novel ever written” —   After I read  the novel  I could understand Child’s enthusiasm ffor this story*

Heretics Leonardo Padura

Cuban novelist iPAdura is probably best known for his noir quartet featuring Havana homicide detective Mario Conde, which the Spanish have produced as a four part series as Four Seasons in Havana. Certainly entertaining, I was more impressed by his novel The Man Who Loved Dogs which followed the life of  Leon Trotsky’s assassin, with particularly heart-rending episodes set in Hitler’s dress rehearsal for  WWII, the Spanish Civil War. Now comes his new creation Heretics a story that radiates from the infamous incident surrounding the May 1939 voyage of the ocean liner St Louis with 937 ‘stateless’ Jews to Havana, radiating forward to 2007 and  traveling back in time a few centuries with fascinating tangent about a Rembrandt painting that ends up in a Polish stetl.  More revealing (as in real) about the perfidy of the Cuban officials in 1939 (and the later travails of Cuban exiles in Miami) than any documented history could provide, Heretics manages to convert  a few hundred years of history into a story, accessible and intelligible without an excess of factual data…And remember, much takes place in the  US amusement park, Havana…

 

 

 

 

Ancient Minstrel Jim Harrison

 

The recently departed Jim Harrison a true meat eating literary lion produced a series of volumes peculiar to him, three novellas ( you don’t know what a novella is?) tomes. This posthumous volume features as its entitled piece, a fairly accurate portrayal of Harrison and exhibiting him as the observant, good-natured, ravenous and droll to hilarious good fellow. You laugh *I’m not sure about crying), you smile, you ponder, you marvel. All the wonders of a well-turned page can evoke…

 

Augusttown Kae Miller

 

Jamaican-born poet and a well-travelled resident of Brixton London Kei Miller,  provides radiant snapshots and thumbnails of post-colonial village life proximal to Jamaican capital, Kingstown. It’s long on Race and Place, which for literary citizens of the world have great value…

 

 

 

 

There Your Heart Lies Mary Gordon

 

 

I think Mary Gordon has written eight novels but this is the first that I have read. Ostensibly I was drawn to yet another recent narrative set in the perilous center of the Spanish Civil War.To which, not sufficient attention is paid. There are numerous interesting plot twist and turns but the portrayal of the 90 year old Spanish Civil War veteran and her grandchild and their relationship is quite plainly, seductive.

 

 

 

Who Killed Pier Barol Richard Mason

South African born and London resident, novelist  Richard Mason completes his triptych about low-born Dutchman Piet Barol and his struggles to rise to the moneyed upper class. Set in pre-WWI  South Africa, Barol is a clever and multitalented con man who meets and marries a woman equally as talented and bent. This story takes you into the bush and into the lives the land’s original people at a time when they are beginning to suffer the depredations of what would soon become apartheid and genocide. Barol is a shrewd reporter on the class and racial conventions and his prose from the point of non-human sentients is a wonderful leap of imagination (something that Jim Harrison and the recently departed Brian Doyle did well with).

 

 

 

The Bones of Paradise Jonis Agee

 

A mystery and a history not set  in the favorite locale of Western writers— unacknowledged third nation that exists around the USA Mexican boundary—this narrative is set in a western state called Nebraska. All the major players are represented —Whites, Mexicans, Native Americans, Nomads Emancipated Women. Set ten years  after the US Army’s Seventh Cavalry’s infamous  massacre known as  Wounded Knee , Jonis Aggee’s great storytelling places the reader in the still wild  19th West and clears away some of the view obstructing mythology…

 

The Crossing Andrew Miller

 

Though I don’t  recall ever reading a review or a mention of an Andrew Miller novel in a US medium, I have without understanding why,  picked- up some of his novels in the past and been pleased that I did. I especially enjoyed Pure set in France in the late Eighteenth century witb character tasked a very unusual mission. His new opus, ostensibly begins with Scenes from a marriage but gracefully and seamlessly transits to a solo oceanic sail. Not having sailed  farther than the ocean around Manchester (MA ) harbor, lacking any particular interest in sailing or oceanic conveyance  I was still transfixed by the  by the vigilance and energy required to cross an ocean in a small ship. The last novel that I recall which had oceanic sailing as a vantage point  was Robert Stone’s.Outerbridge Reach— a story of one Stone’s troubled characters  involved in a world circumnavigating ship race

 

 

Milena, or The Most Beautiful Femur in the World by Jorge Zepeda Patterson , Adrian Nathan West (Translator)

 

Despite Mexico’s  proximity (as Mexican’s intone, “So far from God and so close to the United States”) and various Latin BOOMS and BOOMLETS, Mexican novelists are just beginning to get recognition in USA.Imprints such as Deep Vellum and Restless Books are making valuable contributions and this award winning (in Spain)  does  for human sex trafficking and  hybrid modes of corruption what Winslow’s The Power of the Dog did for the narcotic drug  (Wall Street/Cartel industrial complex) industry. One would hope (against hope ) that the increasing presence of this pestilential activity in  contemporary crime stories (see Season Three of John Ridley’s American Crime would occasion some serious efforts by world’s power structures.But much like PEACE, there is no money in eradicating human trafficking. I leave to you to figure out what this quirky title is about.

 

 

So Much Blue Percival Everett

 

As such things go, I was unaware of writer Percival Everett until I saw mention of him in one of the early 2000’s  literary web sites, unfortunately saddled with the inelegant rubric  ‘blog .  Manned by a delightful mind whose name escapes me, The Minor Chord , The Major Fall was a many levels above the jejune unfiltered gibberish to which media careerists claimed the Internet gave license. It was resonantly valuable to me as I have been delighted to read most every thing Everett has written since. And at least once a  companionable conversation that you can find on line and anthologized in Conversations with Percival Everett. I came  across a  lucid  essay on Everet’s new novel by Jesse McCarthy. Here’s a snippet**

 

  In a characteristic Everett move, Kevin’s race is only glancingly evoked in the novel. The first overt mention of it unsurprisingly comes from The Bummer, a character in the El Salvador section who is the walking embodiment of crude explicit racism. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you’re a nigger,” he warns. When Kevin’s son Will asks him what he wanted to be when he was growing up, we learn that Kevin had an uncle Ty who was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, an illustrious heritage deflated by the knowledge that “Uncle Ty was a fucking asshole.” One of Everett’s great achievements has always been his unassuming portrayal of characters that defy the grotesque strait-jacket of racialized characterization, which so much of American fiction (or American culture in general) simply can’t give up. But racial invisibility is as pure a fantasy as racial stereotype…

 

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1. http://don-winslow.com/books/the-force/

2. https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/sad-and-boujee/

RIP Jim Harrison

 

 

 

Jim Harrison’s friend Phil Caputo posted this eulogy on Face book

 

My good friend and fellow writer, Jim Harrison, died today at about 5pm in his winter home near Patagonia, Arizona. Prolific novelist, poet, and essayist, Harrison was one of the greats of American literature, arguably the last of a breed of American writers who lived hard but well, never went to a creative writing school, knew what it was like to work with your hands and back, and had a personal magnetism that drew people to him from all walks of life — cattle ranchers, film personalities like Jack Nicholson, bird watchers and bird hunters, and of course other writers. I first met Jim in 1975 in Montana, where I was finishing my first book, “A Rumor of War.” We’d been friends ever since, talking and drinking and hunting and fishing together. Perhaps my most memorable experience took place in 1997, when he and I got lost in the Arizona mountains and had to spend a very cold night (it was 16 degrees above zero) huddled around a campfire until rescued by two resourceful officers from the Arizona Fish and Game Department. Jim lost his wife, the beautiful and enigmatic Linda Harrison, in September of last year, and I can’t help but wonder if he found life without her too lonely and wanted to be reunited with her. A sentimental notion, I suppose. My wife, Leslie, and I got a call tonight (March 26) from Dr. Alfredo Guevara (a mutual friend) informing us of Jim’s death. He was at Harrison’s old adobe house on Sonoita Creek, to where he’d been summoned to confirm the death. Also there was Jim’s friend and right-hand man, Abel Murietta. Che (Dr Guevara’s tongue-in-cheek nickname) asked us to come over and say goodbye to Jim before his remains were taken away. That we did. We found him on the floor of his study, where he’d fallen from his chair, apparently from a heart attack. He’d died a poet’s death, literally with a pen in his hand, while writing a new poem. He was a legendary figure in American letters, a man who could be difficult but never ever dull, and one of the most original personalities I have ever known. Irreplaceable. And he will be missed.

 

 

One of the best profiles I have read on Harrison, entitled the Last Lion can be found here

Bissell observes:

HARRISON HAS OUTLASTED those critics who initially wrote him off as a Hemingway-derived regionalist, and at times he has been as successful as a modern American writer can possibly be. For the first half of the 1970s, however, Harrison was trapped in that odd half-success of acclaim that lacks financial recompense. From 1970 to 1976, he made around $10,000 a year. Things got so bad that several people came to the Harrisons’ aid, ­including Jack Nicholson. (They met on the set of The Missouri Breaks, for which McGuane wrote the script.) Harrison’s financial troubles were considerably worsened by the fact that he did not file tax returns for half a decade.

Harrison’s unlikely solution to this penury was to write Legends of the Fall, a book of novellas. He wrote the title novella in nine days, basing large parts of the story on the journals of Linda’s grandfather. Legends is about a father and three sons whose fortunes wrathfully diverge around a woman. In 1977, Esquire publishedLegends in its 15,000-word entirety—an impossible thing to imagine ­today, assuming James Franco does not try his hand at novellas—and the movie rights were purchased. The Brad Pitt film didn’t appear until 1994, but Harrison was still paid handsomely. In 1978, he was stunned to realize that he made more money in the previous year than the president of General Motors.

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I had the distinct pleasure of conversing with Jim Harrison in 2004 :

Writer Jim Harrison’s substantial body of work includes four volumes of novella trilogies, The Beast God Forgot to Invent, Legends of the Fall, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, and Julip; and eight novels, The Road Home, Wolf, A Good Day to Die, Farmer, Warlock, Sundog, Dalva, and his newest, True North. Additionally, he has published seven poetry collections, most recently The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems; Just Before Dark, a book of essays and collected nonfiction, The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, a collection of essays on food; and a children’s book, The Boy Who Ran to the Woods. And, of course, numerous screenplays and his memoir, Off to the Side (of which Jonathan Yardley said, “Literary careerists will find nothing here to help them take the next step up the ladder, but plain readers will find lovely prose, an original mind and a plainspoken man.”). Harrison’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into 22 languages and are international bestsellers. After years of living in Michigan, Harrison recently moved to Montana. He divides his time between there and Arizona.

True North tells the story of the son of a wealthy timber family, including a depraved and alcoholic father, a besotted, pill-popping mother, a lapsed priest uncle, and a sister who defies family expectations by consorting with the Native American-Finnish gardener’s son. It is David Burkett’s nearly lifelong project to come to terms with the sins of his fathers and to travel his life’s journey benefiting from the tutelage of a the wonderful and courageous women he has loved. The reviews of True North have been mixed—and I might add, undependable—but Gordon Hauptfleisch exhibits a good grasp of this novel:

Still, if Harrison’s newest work is flawed and uneven, it is nevertheless a rich and satisfying read for the strenuously poetic passages detailing not only the complexities, quirks, and intricacies of human emotions and interactions, but also for conveying a solid sense of place. Harrison strays now and then from his Michigan birthplace, as he has throughout his life and in his writing, but the most authentically portrayed and vivid scenes in True North are those that take place in the Upper Peninsula, making a rustic backwoods cabin in the forbidding frozen wilderness seem the quintessence of hearth and home. It certainly helps elucidate why a character would go to the ends of the world to safeguard his little corner of it.
Jim Harrison and I (and Rosie faithful pooch) gabbed for a while during the Boston leg of the recent book tour he has referred to as “a month in a dentist chair.” I might add, my Labrador Rosie is also a big Harrison fan.

All photos copyright © Robert Birnbaum 2016

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Robert Birnbaum: Last night you finished your reading with a poem called “Adding It Up.”

Jim Harrison: Yeah.

RB: Which you recommended not to do. [chuckles]

JH: Trying to add it up, yeah. Trying to balance, it’s like balancing the chaos theory.

RB: Does that indicate [a certain] self-consciousness about aging?

JH: No, I think it’s natural to be aware of it. I just wrote my second short story, which I discussed the other day with Deborah Treisman of the New Yorker. It’s called “Biological Outcast,” about the sexual thoughts of an older man wandering through New York City on a May afternoon. No, you are very conscious of that kind of thing. How old are you?

RB: Fifty-seven.

JH: It’s coming. You know, just thinking about—I don’t know if it’s self-consciousness. Everybody becomes intermittently aware that it’s passing faster than they thought it would. You know?

RB: There are reminders. On the other hand, there are moments that last so long.

JH: Well, I like that idea because I lived for 35 years rather close to an Indian reservation, Anishinabe-Chippewa. One of my friends there, a real geezer, said that our error is that life lasts exactly seven times longer than the way we live it, if you slow everything down, which is an interesting point. I can do that when fishing or walking. Then there are book tours, where everything is so geometrically staged. So you have a 19-page itinerary, with everything down to the last minute.

RB: You did have that story recently in the New Yorker, “Father Daughter.” Deborah Treisman is talking to you about another one?

JH: Yeah.

RB: Are these stories being written to be specifically published in the New Yorker?

JH: No, not really. David Remnick and I had a meeting a year ago with Deborah—[about] getting me to do something for them. It’s a more open magazine than it was years ago when it was, it seemed to me, specifically New England, though they did publish the entirety of that novella, Woman Lit by Fireflies, about 15 years ago. They published the whole thing. But they no longer do pieces that long. It was 110 pages.

RB: Do you have a sense that you are not paid attention to in the East Coast?

JH: That’s basically true. Sometimes I wonder, because my last two readings in New York, down at the mother store of Barnes & Noble, have been very well attended. But I’m not sure that any of that matters. We are all naturally xenophobic. New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York—in case you haven’t noticed. Most of them wouldn’t have any frame of reference for a novel like Dalva. I actually had a guy in New York, an unnamed literary critic, ask me, “Do you know an Indian?” That’s an interesting question.

RB: I thought it interesting that there is a multitude of literary websites, many of which regularly report what the New Yorker’s weekly story is. When your story came out, unless I missed it, none of these sites made mention of it.

JH: I don’t know. I’m rather remote from what some refer to as the centers of ambition, just because I like to live in places—most places I live you can’t see any neighbors at all. None. And that suits me. Partly, it’s [about] claustrophobia.

RB: You couldn’t have been claustrophobic in Michigan and now in Montana and in Arizona?

JH: We’re down near the Mexican border, down in the mountains.

RB: What does it say that in the last year the New Yorker published a story by [Thomas] McGuane, which I don’t think they had done for the longest time, and now by you?

JH: Well, they are looking for that kind of thing. They’re not just sitting there waiting anymore. I am doing a food piece for them of a peculiar origin. A friend of mine, a book collector/dealer in Burgundy, France, had a lunch for a group of friends that had 37 courses in November and took 11 hours. [both laugh]

RB: I thought you swore off these kinds of indulgences?

JH: No, I just picked at the food. Nineteen wines. It was a nice lunch. [both laugh] This was all food from the 17th and 18th centuries. He is a great bibliophile of ancient books on food and wine. So he made tortes of pig’s noses, you know. Old timey stuff. It was interesting, of course, the origins of dishes.

RB: You alluded last night to the fact that you were doing more journalism.

JH: Any time I feel closed in—well, then I’ll try something else. I’m not rational enough to be a good journalist.

RB: What!

JH: I fly off the handle too easily.

RB: Uh huh. For instance that remarkable and moving piece that you wrote for Men’s Journal on living on the border, that was irrational?

So Ana Claudia crossed with her brother and child into Indian country, walking up a dry wash for 40 miles, but when she reached the highway she simply dropped dead near the place where recently a 19-year-old girl also died from thirst with a baby at her breast. The baby was covered with sun blisters, but lived. So did Ana Claudia’s. The particular cruelty of a dry wash is that everywhere there is evidence of water that once passed this way, with the banks verdant with flora. We don’t know how long it took Ana Claudia to walk her only 40 miles in America, but we know what her last hours were like. Her body progressed from losing one quart of water to seven quarts: lethargy, increasing pulse, nausea, dizziness, blue shading of vision, delirium, swelling of the tongue, deafness, dimness of vision shriveling of the skin, and then death, the fallen body wrenched into a question mark. How could we not wish that politicians on both sides of the border who let her die this way would die in the same manner? But then such people have never missed a single lunch. Ana Claudia Villa Herrera. What a lovely name

 

r.

RB: I thought that piece was in an odd venue for something so poignant and sorrowful and thoughtful. What was the response?

JH: Well, I had a quite a response. I like to stay off brand.

RB: [laughs]

JH: I don’t want to be just a writer that can be identified in one kind of—

RB: You mean Harper’s, Atlantic, New Yorker?

JH: Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. I don’t want any of that. One becomes overly aware of that at certain times of one’s life, and then you think, “Oh God, I made a deal with that crowd.”

RB: That presumes you have a good sense of how people are seeing you.

JH: No, I don’t necessarily—I’m not sure one could give a lot of time to thinking about it. It would break your motion, what you are doing. You know?

 

RB: I think that in Off to the Side you mention that in your lifetime the city/country population has shifted from 70 percent country and 30 percent city to the other way around. Would that be something that affects your following, especially on the East Coast?

JH: My type of writer gains an audience by accretion. I don’t think it’s advertising or anything. Why do I read things? It’s basically word of mouth. Some friend or someone I know whose taste I respect says, “You gotta read this.” Then I read it. I rarely read or buy a book because of a review. I had noticed, it’s interesting, it’s getting a little more like France here, which is curious. There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why. I certainly don’t have a pop audience or a strictly literary audience. It’s all spread out. But that was very gradually acquired.

RB: The only criticism I have encountered of you that I didn’t have a response to, mostly because I don’t think I understand it, is that you are a torch carrier for “male sentimentality.” Do you know what that means?

JH: That’s the same violin they have been playing for a long time—it’s not a very large percentage of feminists that place a great deal of stock in never being understood. We can’t understand them. Which is bullshit. I don’t see gender as the most significant fact of human existence. It’s that old idea that when you suddenly wake up at 3 a.m., what sex are you? I don’t get that. It’s sort of the flip side of male chauvinism. It’s a female chauvinism or refusal to think that anyone can have any solid form of empathy of any sort.

 

 

RB: It seems to be a dismissal of the writer’s mission, which is to be credible on a wide range of different kinds of characters.

JH: Well, exactly. It’s a little catchword and you’ll notice there are people—I remember when I wrote McGuane about moving west finally, when we had talked about it 36 years ago.

RB: [laughs]

JH: I said, “Christ, I hope when I come out there I will no longer have to hear the words, ‘closure’ and ‘healing.’”

RB: [laughs]

JH: And he says, “No, out here you’ll hear ‘megafauna’ and ‘sustainable.’“ [both laugh] I mean there are these little terms that people use.

RB: I think you refer to them as “verbal turds” somewhere.

JH: Yeah. People place great stock in these things, which to me are absolutely meaningless. Like, “Bob has issues.” What the fuck does that, mean? Stop it! Yeah, yeah, I remember René Char said, “Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.”

RB: [laughs] It strikes me that you seem to be dismissive of two things that have great currency in America: psychotherapy and anti-depressant medication.

JH: I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

RB: [laughs]

JH: For symptomatic relief of human suffering. Only when I’m in New York. We have a correspondence this high. [makes a gesture to indicate size of a stack of letters] No, I think, I think you naturally always have to be careful from both Jesus and Kierkegaard—[they] said to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. This isn’t a bandage thing, you know.

RB: Yeah. Right.

JH: It’s just like young writers, of whom I am deluged—you have to be giving your entire life to this because that’s the only way it’s possible. This can’t be an avocation. It’s the whole thing. Or nothing.

RB: And what do they say?

JH: Most of them, that’s very intimidating. They really haven’t wanted to commit to it, to that extent. But they have to. It’s a strange thing—I didn’t want to understand it when I first read it but I was 19 or something—Dylan Thomas said in order to be a poet or a writer you have to be willing to fall on your face over and over and over. Everybody wants to be cool—

RB: You have to be willing?

JH: Yeah. Which is an interesting point, yeah.

RB: You have to know that that’s going to happen.

JH: You should. [both laugh]

RB: I may never get over Tibor Fischer’s story of having being rejected by 56 publishers.

JH: It happens doesn’t it? Portrait of the Artist went to 19. The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a précis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

RB: That does speak to the crapshoot nature of the enterprise.

JH: Yeah, somewhat. Persist, though, and it will happen.

RB: There is so much subjectivity. I know in a simple kind of banal way that I have reread things and wondered what I was thinking the first or second time. It’s as if I hadn’t read it before—like a new work.

JH: Uh huh, that’s the chaotic aspect I’ve always enjoyed. That’s—the void isn’t empty. [both laugh] I like that. I tell young writers, “You know, part of being a writer is to know how this works. And rather than you trying to throw yourself in my lap, why don’t you go, save your coin and go to New York and live in the Bronx cheaply and find out how it works.” I had that advantage when we lived in Boston, in the ‘60s, the only job I could get was as a salesman for a book wholesaler. I just drove around and talked to bookstores and public libraries and school librarians. And that was a very healthy thing to see in the warehouse how this happens. Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works. Sometimes in literary biography you forget that the publisher isn’t the main thing. They like to think they are—when you are in New York and you see these people, it’s amazing. But, there are good and bad ones, historically, obviously. It’s important for writers to know that just like a farmer growing 80 acres of something and then not knowing what can be done with it, “How am I going to get rid of my chickens, my milk?” On and on.

RB: Isn’t what all these writing programs are about?

JH: Yes, but they are singularly unrealistic.

RB: There are people who complain that they are more about the vocational aspects of writing than the writing.

JH: I’m not that familiar with them but I do see—I mean, are there 25,000 MFA manuscripts wandering around out there? We have really made the MFA, as I have pointed out before, almost part of the civil service. We started with two really good one ones, Iowa and Stanford, you know, Stegner’s program.

RB: Didn’t Montana have a good program early on?

JH: Yeah, but now suddenly—you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too. So they all want, if it works, a department like that. The trouble is there’s not enough appropriate staff to go round. I am for a novelist, for a poet, well read. I really keep up. I see whole staffs that I don’t know the work of any of them. And I wonder where they came from. There is this problem of doubting that it can be taught. I only taught in that great period at Stonybrook. And I didn’t teach writing. I taught modern poetics. I have never been able to find the sheet of paper but I had this idea of how to construct a good MFA program. OK, at that time in the ‘60s, there was Ben DeMott and R.V. Cassill and we had a meeting in New York trying to figure out how we could get universities to hire writers [laughs]—because they needed jobs. OK, it got out of control. I had the idea—you meet up for a month in a location, right? You have your journal and then you get to the main 300 books in the modernist tradition. Or whatever. Then the student spends a year in the country, preferably at menial labor. Comes back for a month. Then he spends a year in the city and comes back for a month and then the end of it the third year, several months with the teachers, just to make sure it isn’t one of those grade school-high school-college MFAs. Because that’s only a narrow experience. You know how [Ezra] Pound talked about the grave danger of starting from too narrow a base. Then you really tip over very easily. It’s like the one-book wonder. What you are doing, where are you going to go?

RB: It’s all interior and experientially deprived. And ultimately, of limited interest.

JH: Not to me. It’s hard to be programmatic about it but I question—in fact it’s insignificant that I’m questioning the value of it because it’s already there. Another one of these improbable boondoggles. It caused a revolution in the rise in expectations. Which is totally—

RB: It does provide a fair number of writers sinecures. And, of course, the conventional wisdom is that it also, at the very least, creates a new generation of decent readers.

JH: That’s the best point that’s the solidest point of all of them. I think McGuane pointed out to me once because he had a solid base to his economic thinking—

RB: In contradistinction to you?

JH: Yeah, he’s smart that way. He pointed out to me that—we’re still whining about it—“Isn’t strange that a person can get a lifetime-guaranteed position on the basis of a slender volume of poems?” Yeah, that’s an extraordinary break, if they got in early enough. Now, it’s a question of competition. I was always shocked at the offers I would get. Even when I felt totally anonymous, still in my 30s and 40s. They would make me these incredible offers. And I would always answer that somebody has to stay on the outside.

RB: [laughs]

JH: I would also answer, “Are you sure, that much money?” It’s like Gary Snyder said when I once went out and spent a week with him a few years back, he says, “I always turned down this thing at [University of California at] Davis, that regents’ professor[ship].” He could have gotten into any of the California universities. He said, “It never occurred to me to ask how much they were paying.” [laughs]

RB: How pure can you be?

JH: It wouldn’t have occurred to him. He is decidedly non-venal.

 

RB: One striking thing about True North is that it is uncommon to make a dog a character in a novel.

JH: Who, Carla? Well, they are so specifically characters in our lives. Why not?

RB: Right, why not? So why don’t more writers include animal companions as characters?

JH: I used to get criticized for putting food in novels. These are people ignorant of the novel tradition. It was always in French and English fiction. But a lot of us are still puritanical, still sort of ashamed they have to fill up every day. It’s like food isn’t serious. And a faculty meeting is? [Both laugh] What gays used to say, “Puhlease!”

RB: Given how many people love and keep dogs it would seem natural that more dogs would appear in fiction as part of the lives and families of the characters.

JH: That didn’t occur to me but when I was doing it, it seemed natural. I grew up in a very odd way because my father was an agronomist and he needed to think—and I grew up thinking that everybody had—that animals were our fellow creatures. I don’t consider myself more important than a crow. I never have. How could I possibly be? Or a dog. We are all in this together. So I am not a victim of the French Enlightenment.

RB: [laughs heartily]

JH: There are some advantages to a peasant background.

RB: So in an odd way, this is not an enlightened view?

JH: So they would say, intellectually. I remember when I was 19 and reading Gogol or Isaac Singer because that meant a great deal to me—because even though they are foreign stories, they were more the kind of thing I grew up around. Emotionally vigorous family. Talking out loud.

RB: Chaotic.

JH: Chaotic and moody. So it was odd—it was more familiar to me.

RB: I find it odd but understandable that so many people treat their animal companions as children, as almost humans.

JH: Yeah, that’s true. That happens. People, there’s no end to the craziness of people, so I’m not upset by that when I see it.

RB: I’m bothered that they are not seeing, in this case, dogs on their own terms.

JH: Well, quite often that’s true. They expect a dog to be something for them that a dog can’t be. Whether it’s a surrogate child or what?

RB: I like Ed Hoagland’s observation that instead of expecting dogs to be more human, we ought to try to be more like dogs.

JH: That’s wonderful. That old Cheyenne thing, Lakota too, called Heyoka, a spiritual renewal. Following your dog around all day and behaving totally like the dog. If the dog lays down, you lay down. That lovely calming sense—my Lab always understood, my other dogs haven’t to the extent that my Lab did, when I was depressed she would try to get me off my cot in my cabin and get me to go do something. “Just do something. Just don’t lay there, you schmeil.” [laughs] “Schmuck.”

RB: So what happens when you write a sad scene for an animal? Is it hard for you to do?

JH: Oh yes. That’s an irony. People have asked a number of times about Carla. I was torn. Isn’t it interesting, you create a dog out of air, right? And then when she dies you break into tears. That’s natural. There is a specious fear of that kind of sentimentality—but it’s in all good literature. And then the idea of being nifty and cool and ignoring the true emotional content of your life. Why would anyone want to read about that? That kind of cold—

RB: Why would one?

JH: I don’t.

RB: I’ve been watching this excellent TV series from England called Cracker. Robbie Coltrane plays a forensic psychiatrist working for the police, who smokes, drinks and gambles, to excess.

JH: Oh, yeah. He’s awfully good. I adore that guy. He’s just so on the money.

RB: Yes, he is. So there is a scene where his mother has just died and he is sitting with his wife, crying. And he says there is something delicious about this, meaning that this grief that he is feeling is a rare real emotion that he can savor and experience as a dog.

JH: I once wrote a poem—I don’t know if I even published it—about how I wanted to throw my own self around and have some real emotions. Although people tend to avoid them, these are always the harshest emotions. It’s like face-to-face, this is the context. We’ve had a lot of friends die recently. I was going to read this poem last night about my shrinking address book. My wife’s best friend died within three days of my brother. How can this be? Well, it’s the end of everybody’s story. As they say the last track you leave, as a mammal is your skull.

RB: It seems we are trained to avoid the emotional—

JH: No question. It’s a part of the culture. I think it’s the economic basis of a lot of our lives. It’s that idea that I imply, I don’t preach in True North, but one of the aspects of it is how the powers that be, the old logging and mining companies, always encourage these people to mythologize their lives. Paul Bunyan! It’s marvelous how they do that. Not that it is just a sucker’s shot; everybody tries to mythologize their efforts. But it’s actually encouraged. It’s that funny thing, the French, they go berserk that we will only take 10 days for vacation. Why? How can you get ahead?

RB: The Italians and the Germans, too?

JH: Even the Germans demand a month or five weeks to walk around in leather shorts or however we think they do it.

RB: What a shell game.

JH: It is in the sense that it ignores quality of life and the inevitable end of life. There’s a story that Catholic priest told me. The Italian dies. The family is talking about the great meals they had together. The French dies. They talk about the great wines they drank. The American dies and the family asks, “Did they leave enough money or do they have enough money, money, money?” But the last 25 years in America have been characterized by imponderable greed. You know, greed, greed, greed. The newspapers made heroes in the dot-com days—there is this guy suddenly worth five million dollars sitting in an empty mansion eating an American cheese sandwich. And they have to have personal shoppers because they don’t know how to buy toilet paper or something like that. Craziness, all that.

RB: I admire your interest in driving around the United States. There is one view that one can develop of a crassly materialistic eating and shopping culture and then there seems to be another rarely seen, that pictures people trying to live reasonable, healthy, full lives.

JH: That’s true. That’s one reason why I have to be a writer. I don’t find anything perceptually accurate or agreeable or sensical about the media view of American culture. The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there’s a major explosion. That’s why I said before, for the MFA program, a year in the country, a year in the city, to get familiarity with the human landscape. You’re not going to get it in a university community.

RB: He may be a neighbor of yours in Montana, but Alston Chase wrote a book about Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber and he excoriates the media for getting everything about Kaczynski wrong.

JH: I know Alston. It’s also interesting that 99 percent of what Ted Kaczynski said made sense.

RB: [laughs]

 

Harrison, & Rosie by Robert Birnbaum

JH: Alston points that out. And it’s sort of, “Uh oh.” It was the killing people that just didn’t work, amongst other things. Historically, nothing is surprising. Some professor—I think up in Connecticut [Wesleyan University] a guy named [Richard] Slotkin, he writes that this violence is the tradition since the inception of America. Just like logging. We want to cut down trees, cut down the buffalo, cut down everything as fast and completely as possible. We have always been this way.

RB: I am currently toying with the notion that there is not one but two or three Americas. It may be a natural inclination to try to see this country as a unity.

JH: No, I think there are at least seven I can identify. That kind of regionality. And again, it causes xenophobia. The unwillingness of people in one part of the country to want to understand people in any sympathetic way, other people. I think it was McGuane that pointed out the assumption in the North that every white Southerner was ex posto facto a racist. I remember reading in Oxford, Mississippi; one thing nice was there were black people in the audience. You don’t see that in the North. Or rarely. I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

RB: It hasn’t changed much, has it. I asked Reynolds Price about what defined Southern culture—trying to get a definition of Southern writing—he said it was the close proximity and familiarity to and with black people.

JH: Yup. Reynolds is a marvelous man. I finally met him a few years ago. I have always enjoyed his work and some of his nonfiction is particularly trenchant. But, that’s true.

RB: There is of course the caricature of the Gothic Southern family, inbred with various bizarre characters and histories.

JH: I got a strange letter from Mississippi in regard to True North. The person said, “I didn’t know a Gothic novel could be written about the North.” [both laugh] “Oh, Dad, you’re such a pill.”

RB: You mentioned last night that you had thought of writing this novel 17 years ago. So what intervened? Why didn’t you start then?

JH: Well, just the accumulation. I brooded about it a long time. And then I brood about different things and usually I have quite a lead time about anything I write. Since I am writing a novella now called Republican Wives, which is fun, right?

RB: Sure.

JH: And, ah, I have been thinking about writing this for about a decade. But then a certain part of your brain is always accumulating the touches, the materials. Of course, you make squiggles in your journals and then, finally, you’re ready.

RB: So, as you’ve said, you write it when you can’t not write it?

JH: Yeah, that’s my rule of thumb.

RB: Does it have the same [working] title all along? True North was always True North?

JH: No, no. That’s more recent. I do have trouble with titles.

RB: Might you have saddled this book with a certain gravity because it has the word ‘true’ in it? A powerful word.

JH: Oh no, I don’t mind being adventuresome that way. I’m going to write a total laborite view of the same region. Which was going to be fun, the Indian-Finn-Cornish-Italian-miner view of it, because I even know that world better, I’ve known a lot of these kind of people that are in True North and they are interesting to me—for obvious reasons.

RB: Has it been unsettling to move from Upper Peninsula Michigan to Montana?

JH: Not at all because I think we have gone to Montana every year since ‘68 except one year. Tom [McGuane] and I kept in touch. Our family vacation was to go to Montana, to go fishing, and my wife’s friends are out there.

RB: Your daughter Jamie is out there also.

JH: See, that’s the whole thing. Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger. So both daughters have been living in Montana for a long time. My wife in this case has stuck with it—she wanted to move to Montana, it was no big deal to me. I can write anywhere. I hated to sell my cabin. I’ve had it 25 years and it meant so much to me. It was a retreat, you know? But it was too far to drive and I am getting older and I only went there three times last year and it involved 15 days of driving. These distances; you can barely drive across Montana in a day.

RB: You say you can write anywhere but might there be a different feeling whereever you might be—in the center of the country you are not near the concentration of microwaves and such—doesn’t Montana feel different?

JH: Well, yeah. I was thinking last year in—not to overplay this hand but it’s interesting. But I was reading a galley by a guy named Mark Spragg coming out by Knopf, an intriguing book. And I was wondering if I agreed with the character who had been injured by a grizzly bear. OK, then I thought, “What am I thinking about?” Last year there were two grizzly attacks on humans within 15 minutes of our home, and last winter a pack of wolves killed 28 sheep within view of our bedroom window. Plus my dog got blinded by a rattlesnake in the yard.

RB: How’d that happen?

JH: She’s an English setter and she obviously pointed and the snake got her twice in the face. It blinded her and deafened her. She’s fine [now] but she’s a little wary about snakes.

RB: How does she move about?

JH: She had a hard time for about four or five months. She is pretty much completely recovered. There is a guy named Harry Greene at Cornell, a fantastic authority on snakes and snake venom—rattlers in particular. He has a beautiful book out about the poisonous snakes of the world. Very complicated poisons; the contents of rattlesnake poison are very involved, toxic substances. A brain surgeon friend of mine in Nebraska, Cleve Tremble, got one in the arm and said it was four or five months before he really felt good again.

RB: The toxins linger in the body that long?

JH: Yeah, your system has really been walloped. I was just in the Yucatan and I met three different people who had to lop off minor parts of their bodies—

RB: [laughs] Minor parts?

JH: After being nicked by a fer-de-lance

RB: By what?

JH: A fer-de-lance, a venomous snake. One had been hit in the foot and chopped it off immediately because if you don’t chop it off you die.

So the Mayans knew of this. One guy had his finger in formaldehyde, he wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons. It’s not that everything is threatening, but it’s a dangerous kind of existence. I’m never frightened in that kind of country. I have been, occasionally, in cities.

RB: What are you afraid of in cities?

JH: Well, guns. In Arizona, it’s curious. You can carry a gun if you wish. In Montana, too. I don’t know anybody that does. That’s an odd thing. Where you can do it, they might have one in their [truck’s] rifle rack. Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit. Or a lot of people do.

If you want to give Stephen King the lifetime award or whatever it is, go ahead. It doesn’t make any difference to me. But that changes the nature of what you are. They lost their literary credibility about 20 years ago when they took it away from the literary people and gave it to the industry. Remember when that happened? RB: On trips to Israel it was something to be in bars and cafes and see people who looked like teenagers with pistols strapped to their ankles or in their pants waist bands.

JH: I definitely would there, too. I did an interview with a Lebanese paper, and I just assumed they were Muslims, but no. Some of those countries, they are everything. Like Coptic Christians in Egypt. It’s a not very clear picture. This American writer who got severely wounded in Lebanon as a journalist, Phil Caputo, this old friend of mine. And he sat in a bar with quite a few of us and explained the political and religious structure of the Middle East. It stupefied people—we wanted to think it was cleaner.

RB: I think that reading Lawrence Durrell gives a clear picture of how unclear or complicated it is.

JH: Yeah, I love Durrell. One of the great underrated works of our time, The Alexandria Quartet. But who’s doing the rating? Does it matter?

RB: Who is doing the rating? The New York Times.

JH: Probably. I said once, and Bill [William] Kennedy quoted me on it, “The people who were condescending to Steinbeck didn’t even write The Grapes of Goofy.” [both laugh] Give me a break.

RB: There is a pervasive fear that literature is always being threatened and somehow the institutions that should be working to preserve or protect it, aren’t doing that. I don’t see why literary culture rise or falls on what the Times or any other journalists do. Really, what’s the problem?

JH: I don’t think there is one. I said that in my memoir. There are some who think they are guardians. They are not inside themselves but they are still at the gate. I’m not sure what that impulse is. They are enumerators. The Casey Kasems of the critical fraternity. They always a have top 40 or top 20.

RB: I don’t mind although I don’t read them.

JH: [laughs]

RB: James Wood or—

JH: But see, Wood is a very bright man. However you think about him, he is incapable of being boring, critically. I don’ t mind contention.

RB: I just don’t find it useful to talk or speculate about who is going to be read in 50 or 100 years.

JH: Well, you can’t .

RB: [laughs] People do.

JH: It’s so funny, in that 50th anniversary edition of the Paris Review that I wrote a little piece in—Donald Hall has a preposterous piece [Death as a Career Move] in there. He is talking about reputation and what happens to people. Like [Archibald] MacLeish from over at Harvard and whether the Pulitzer Prize [McLeish won three] is a pauper’s grave? Something like that.

RB: [laughs]

JH: You wonder what consensus is. Here I am an old man and only once have I ever been asked to be on a [Pulitzer or any] jury.

RB: Really?

JH: Yeah. Where are they getting the jurors except from New York—that seems to be closer—or something. But that seems odd. I’m not that anonymous. So in any prize situation I always want to know who the jurors are. Because you can’t know the validity. If you want to give Stephen King the lifetime award or whatever it is, go ahead. It doesn’t make any difference to me. But that changes the nature of what you are. They lost their literary credibility about 20 years ago when they took it away from the literary people and gave it to the industry. Remember when that happened?

RB: The first winner of the National Book Award was Nelson Algren and I don’t know that many people remember him.

JH: Well, I think some people do. I’ve heard young writers talking about him. You have to be careful about that, too. Because you are more likely to hear them talking about Algren in Missouri or the state of Washington than in New York. Where the thing you hear most of in New York is, “I don’t have time to read.”

RB: [laughs] You were grievously hurt by that—you mention it in Off to the Side.

JH: It’s funny.

RB: Jim Shepard told me that one of his students remarked he was reading a story Shepard had in Esquire but had not yet finished it. Shepard was incredulous, since it was a three-page story.

JH: This is interesting. You can say, “What is it that you do in place of reading? Drink Spritzers?” I don’t know. Does anyone have time to read? I do. And I write a lot. It’s a tonic to find real readers because they just read massively.

RB: You seem to be the only person who publishes novellas.

JH: When I wrote my first book of novellas, that was the only one I knew of. So people would say, “What’s a novella?”

RB: So, what’s a novella?

JH: I just say that old Hoffmanstal-Isak Dinesen thing: A very long story, about a hundred pages. Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

RB: Do you feel like what you write now should be more important?

JH: That’s not up to me.

 

 

####

An Appraisal: Taking Big Bites our of Jim Harrison’s  Voracious Life by Dwight Garner

Interview with Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison on Lakota

Jim Harrison, 1937–2016 Terry McDonell remembers Jim Harrison

Postscript: Jim Harrison, 1937-2016 by Thomas McGuane

 

 

Diverse Diversions: Not Aggravating Aggregations

Kodak ‘Brownie’

Recently I noted (in the cursory manner to which I am accustomed) Teju Cole’s commentary on a Rene’ Burri photo. Over at Howard Dinen’s 1standarddeviation.com, Dinin engages in a informed and illustrated exchange with another photography enthusiast

The big news is that Japan won the Little League World Series (which is a legitimate world competition, unlike some misnomered World Series to which we can point) but we should (and will) note a charming display of sportsmanship from the Chinese Taipei/Uganda (next big beisbol powerhouse) game.

RIP Oliver Saks ” poet laureate of medicine”*, whom millions knew as the physician played by actor Robin Williams in the 1990 film “Awakenings”

The box office hit documentary Amy is not the only recent memorial to MS. Winehouse. Two (so called) art exhibits in San Francisco, A Family Portrait and You Know I’m No Good

Hockey tradition comes to baseball when Edwin Encarnacion hits his third dinger of the game in Toronto

Jim Harrison and Dalai Labrador Rosie [photo: Robert Birnbaum circa 2004]

From Jim Harrison’s Songs of Unreason

When young I read that during the Philippine War
we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn’t seem fair.
During my entire life I’ve been helpless
in this matter. I even dream about it.

***

In summer I walk the dogs at dawn
before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather
I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.
In the pastures we find many oval deer beds
of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.

***

I left this mangy little
three-legged bear two big fish
on a stump. He ate them at night
and at dawn slept like a god
leaning against the stump
in a chorus of birds.

***

The fly on the window is not a distant crow
in the sky. We’re forced into these decisions.
People are forever marrying the wrong people
and the children of the world suffer.
Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.

Vin Scully has been calling baseball games as long as I have been alive—he’s coming back for one more year

ALEX COX is the director who among other films made Repo Man, Walker (for which Joe Strummer did the soundtrack),Sid and Nancy. I recently received a this note, “Robert: This is what old filmmakers do when they show us the barn…”

Alan Watt observes

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

Eleven days before George Scialabba is feted in Cambridge and other parts of the known world

* from Washington Post obitituary

Just Talking: How to Do Things with Words

In the last three decades I have undertaken an open-ended independent post-graduate course of study. Included in my syllabus has been nearly a thousand conversations with people I place under the broad rubric of story tellers. And here I have provided public access to an incomplete list of my notes from my chats, from all across the Internet:

From A (mis) to Z (inn)

Martin Amis [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Martin Amis

Andre Dubus III

Ben Katchor

Tony Earley

W.D.Wetherell

Amy Bloom

Ron Rash

Arthur Bradford

William Giraldi

John Summers

Josh Ritter

Julian Barnes

Adam Gopnik

Ruben Martinez

Chip Kidd

Paul Lussier

Edith Pearlman

Attica Locke

Charles Yu

Jo Nesbo

Alan Gurganus

George Saunders

George Sciallaba

Alan Lightman

Darin Strauss

Manil Suri

Joan Wickersham

Ann Enright

John Sayles

Tony Horwitz

Thisbee Nissen

Jim Harrison

Ben Fountain

Benjamin Anastas

David Shields

Howard Zinn [photo Robert Birnbaum]

Howard Zinn

In Memoriam Rosie (The Dalai Labrador) 1997-2007

Rosie [photo; Robert Birnbaum]

Begone Gone Girl

Zoe Heller [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Having read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl ,which I found to be a serviceable crime story, I saw no need to see the film. But also having been aware of Zoe Heller’s (via a long ago conversation) delightful and sharp tongued explications of the things that continue to float down the roaring cultural shit stream (reinforced in her cameo in The Fifty Year Argument), I read her NYRB’s vivisection of the David Flincher helmed cinematic offering of Gone Girl.

It did not disappoint. Here’s MS Zeller’s conclusion, rendered with Samurai precision:

But a person would have to be in an unusual state of cultural innocence to find any of the film’s ideas remotely startling. The tropes in which it deals—marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy, love is the tender trap, and so on—will be wearily familiar to anyone who has ever seen Married…with Children or heard a Henny Youngman joke.

Here’s a sample from my early 2000’s chat with Zoe Heller about her then recent novel
What Was She Thinking? :

ZH… I thought I was doing something rather daring—

RB: [laughs]

ZH:—and interesting and that would freak people out. No one has been remotely freaked. In fact, obviously my readership is a great deal more sophisticated and relaxed about these things than I thought.

RB: What is daring about it, do you think?

ZH: I’m being slightly facetious. I thought when I finished the book, “Oh dear, particularly in America it will immediately be seized upon.” Let’s get this in proportion. I didn’t think it would be some huge cultural phenomenon. But to the extent that it was seized upon at all, that people would think it was some kind of apologia for sex with little boys. And clearly I hadn’t intended it to be that. I remember watching an old Oprah, with Bernhard Schlink, who wrote The Reader, which is not a book I liked very much but the really interesting thing about this program was that he was confronted with this great army of women who only wanted to talk about the fact of this older woman having sex with a young boy and whether that was legitimate or not. And he was very confused. He had toured across Europe having conversations about this allegory he had written about Nazi Germany and never before encountered people who were just fixated on the moral or ethical question of whether you could have sex with younger people. So I thought that people would think it [my book] too soft in understanding a boy and a kind of hazy area of being 15 and sexually active. Certainly this country does have a kind of—and not just this country, my own country—the West has a history of both exploiting junior sexuality and at the same time being fantastically puritanical and mimsy about it.

Currently reading The Bg Seven by Jim Harrison (Grove/Atlantic)

(One of) My Favorite Baseball(s)

Roz Chast baseball [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Detail from Roz Chast baseball [photo; Robert Birnbaum]

Over the course of my conversational career I have after the conclusion of our chat have asked various authors to sign and or inscribe a baseball for my son ,Cuba. By this time, as you might guess, I have quite a few festooning the trim of my abode.

Part of Cuba Birnbaum Inscribed Baseball collection [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Roz Chast baseball [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Currently reading Brown Dog: Novellas by Jim Harrison( Grove Atlantic)

Me and Amy Grace Loyd

The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd

This conversation took place in the summer of 2013 upon the occasion of the publication of Ms Loyd’s debut novel, The Affairs of Others.No newcomer to the orchards of literature, Ms Loyd has served as an editor at W.W. Norton, The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books, Playboy Magazine, and, most recently the (now defunct)online magazine, Byliner. And she has worked with literary fiction practitioners such a Jess Walter, Charles Yu, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, James Ellroy,Joyce Carol Oates, Chuck Palahniuk, and Nick Hornby.

The Affairs of Others(Picador) is the story of recently widowed Celia Cassill who all but withdraws from life except to engage in the maintenance of her Brooklyn apartment building in which she lives. To be able to maintain her privacy she chooses her few tenants with great care, Nonetheless, she is unable to stay free of their affairs.

Ms Loyd, who is accurately self described as perky, and I chat about her last name, Star Trek 70’s tV programs, defining novellas, Jess Walter, Brooklyn,Playboy magazine,Che Guevara and ghosts. A good time was had by all.

Robert: Why is your last name only spelled with one ‘L’?

Amy: We have no idea but the story we like to tell people is that we were part of the Lloyds of London—big banking insurance company—but we embezzled money so they stripped us of an L and sent us to the New World. It’s not true but it makes for a good story.

RB: Why did you want to become a writer?

AGL: Well, I don’t know. It’s an excellent question and it’s a boring answer: I’ve always just enjoyed reading literature. When I was really little—little-ish—I was probably around 13, I got cast out of a clique of popular girls and then they tortured me for a while…

R: What was your transgression.

A: I told a secret.

R: Oh! Big deal!

A: Yeah. Well, it was a big deal… But it allowed me to spend a lot of time alone and in that time I did a lot of reading and I thought, “Man, these stories are doing wonders for me.” And I began to think, “Well maybe I could write a few stories”, you know. So back then I began thinking that’s what I’d like to do. When I graduated from college I went to New York and got into publishing thinking, “Well, do I want to write or do I just want to be around writers and help them with their work?” It turns out it was a little bit of both. So I became an editor and I was an editor for a long time—still am an editor—and I wrote kind of in secret, on the side.

R: What do you mean you wrote in secret?

A: I didn’t really tell my writers that I was writing—I didn’t tell a lot of people. I didn’t make it an announcement, I didn’t say, “I’m a writer!” I just wrote on my own time. Because I edit Charles Yu, Jess Walter, Margaret Atwood… I was at Playboy for a long time but before that I was at the New York Review of Books Classics series, that wonderful imprint that resuscitates lost works of literature with contemporary writers writing introductions. I worked with Jonathan Lethem there. I told Jonathan I wrote and he has always been very supportive… but if you’re working with writers you don’t want to say, “Hey! I write too! We’re part of the same club!” Because we’re not; I’m there to edit them. I’m not there to swap stories with them.

R: But you could go, like, I’ve got this character I’m working on, I just don’t know if this is what he does or says, right? Something specific…

A: I guess I was a purist. I wanted to keep my relationship with them kind of pure and I wanted their prose to be the focus of our discussions.

R: So do you compartmentalize your editing persona when you’re writing yourself?

A: I try to because otherwise I can’t get any work done. I’m too busy editing… and I’m a real pain in the neck, I’m a very exacting editor in certain ways; there are certain things I get really focused on… which I think my writers mostly appreciate but I’m sure I can be a real pain in the neck sometimes. I certainly am a pain in the neck for myself. If I can’t get out of that headspace, sometimes I’ll stop writing, or I’ll just let myself edit and get that out of my system.

R: What of Jess Walter’s work did you edit?

A: When I was at Playboy we published a few different stories of his: We Live in Water, and was it Anything Helps? I’m forgetting the title of it right now but it was a story about a con man who gets conned by one of his employees. Then I did an interview with him for the Zero that went in the Harper Perennial issue and then when I moved to Byliner—I’m now editing for Byliner [now defunct]—he wrote an unbelievably good story for us called Don’t Eat Cat—it’s both a zombie story and a send-up of a zombie story. When I left Playboy part of the reason I left and was glad to leave was that I couldn’t fit stories of any length in that magazine anymore.

R: Does Playboy still publish stories?

A: It still does, but unfortunately the editorial…

R: I just read the interviews (laughs).

A: Well there are some good ones mixed in!

R: [chuckles] I know.

Amy Grace Loyd [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

A: The page count reduced so much that they do genre fiction and mostly excerpts from novels now. So when I left that was really their focus.

Jess Walter [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

R: Jess Walter is a very wonderful writer; that last book Beautiful Ruins was just… it was immensely entertaining and engaging and funny…

A: And expansive! And traveling different times… and also full of longing but, as you say, also tremendously funny. And the way he satirizes Hollywood—it’s great. There are so many ways into that book.

R: And the historical references aren’t gratuitous—they’re not there to just… and I like where he got the title from: kind of obscure but…

A: Yeah! Perfect, right? From Richard Burton. Absolutely.

R: Yeah… Spokane’s own Jess Walter. So most of your editing work has been about short fiction?

Beautiful Ruins by jess Walter

A: Yeah, because I worked at the New Yorker—I was Bill Buford’s assistant when I was in my twenties and I thought, Man, wouldn’t it be neat to continue to edit short fiction? But I’d have to stay at the New Yorker forever and ever and I had other plans at the time. So I went off to MacDowell to write—still this gnawing desire to do some of my own writing…

[adjusting equipment]

R: You’ve been around sort of great literary centers of New York…

A: Yeah, I have! So I worked for Buford, didn’t stay long, decided I’d go off to MacDowell and write. When I came back I got the job at the New York Review of Books, resuscitating those lost classics—I was an associate editor there…

R: What a great job!

A: It was! It was fantastic, it just didn’t necessarily pay as well as one might hope… and while I was there I wrote to Playboy and thought, “Boy, they’ve published some great fiction since 1953, I wonder if they’re interested in hiring a literary editor again.” They hadn’t had one for a while. And I wrote a letter, didn’t hear, thought, Okay, I’m too rarefied a bird for them, I’m not going to hear, but about two years later this man, Chris Napolitano—what a man!—called me up and said, Hey, I got your letter here, do you want to come in and interview? As if I’d written yesterday.

R: So it moves slowly…

A: Yeah, he needed to, I guess, raise the money or persuade whoever needed to be persuaded that they needed a dedicated literary editor again.

R: But in the meantime you weren’t looking at other—weren’t there other venues that might be attractive, especially all the new things that are coming up?

A: Well I was pretty content at my job at the New York Review and then I left that to go to Yaddo and it was after I got back from Yaddo…

R: Going to those places… that’s like vacation?

A: Yeah, and also it allowed me to remind myself that I liked to write and that I cared about writing and while I was there to take care of other writers and their work and that was significant, I couldn’t forget this other thing and that was an itch I had to scratch.

R: What were you writing?

A: I was working on a book of novellas then…

R: What’s a novella?

A: What’s a novella? Excellent question. Some would say it’s just a short novel, some would say it’s a long short story, but it depends. It certainly is a complete story, and maybe you’ve got more time to explore more characters or more action. I love ‘em. And we publish them at Byliner—that’s one of the attractions.

R: Jim Harrison has three or four volumes of novellas…

A: Yeah! And he’s got a new one coming out with Grove/Atlantic soon. You must like him. He’s a free spirit. What other novella writer you can think of?

R: Well, Andre Dubus’s new book has a novella…

A: And Richard Russo writes novellas.

R: Really

A: Yep. There was a book called Interventions of novellas; his daughter illustrated it. Jonathan Lethem writes the occasional long story arching into novella… Margaret Atwood wrote three related long stories for us that are going to now be part of a bigger book… I’m trying to think who else wrote long stories for us… Amy Tan

R: So that’s what you were doing, writing novellas

A: At that time, when I was at Yaddo I was writing novellas; then I came back from Yaddo and eventually got that job at Playboy and I had a book of novellas too, linked, and a wonderful editor at Pantheon named Deborah Garrison was interested in publishing them… she’s lovely; she’s a very good poet. But unfortunately, she had me revise them and we were about to move ahead but somebody there—I still don’t know who—didn’t like the novellas. So it didn’t happen, I put them away in storage…

R: Track them down!

A: I would like to! Give ‘em a… put my boot… where the sun don’t shine. And I started working at Playboy and I was pretty fanatical about getting people to think about Playboy differently and to think about us—despite the nudity, despite Heffner in his robe—to think about us as a literary destination as well. So I was devoted to that. But at some point—I started at Playboy around 2005, was working on those novellas still until 2006 or 7, put them away, only dabbled in writing a little bit, wrote some stories and then around 2009 I began to conceive this book.

R: What did you start with?

A: Well, you know it’s funny: the novellas had been omniscient point-of-view so I really wanted a first-person story and I wanted a voice I could live with for a while, especially while working full-time and working on other people’s work it needed to be a voice that really grabbed me. So I started with her—that first line, the body of a woman aging, a landscape that asks a lot of the eyes. I had read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I loved—the resignation in that voice, that man looking back on his life—and I thought, Could a young woman, who’s been through some trauma, have a narrative where she’s declaring in a funny way her life over in certain ways? And when you’re at Playboy and you’re on the computer and you’re on the phone and you’re emailing and you’re Tweeting and you’re Pinging and you’re doing all that crazy stuff, the idea of a woman—a young woman—who really wanted to be apart from contemporary demands, the demands of contemporary life—that really appealed to me. And a woman who wasn’t willing to give up her husband even though he was dead—losing somebody doesn’t mean you stop loving him.

R: You know, what made her appealing was not the attempt to cut herself off the grid, so to speak, but was that she was, I thought, very thoughtful and, really, thoughtfully honest about appraising herself and appraising other people.

A: Yeah.

R: That’s really what grabbed me when I first

A: Yeah… And I like that about her too, that her life has become so distilled in a way—she knows what’s important to her, so she calls a spade a spade. And I love that about her. On the other hand, because she’s trying so hard to contain herself, in some ways she’s very unreliable. Right? Because she’ll say, “I’m going up to kick Hope out” but, as you know, something else entirely happens, or, “I respect my tenants’ privacy” but then she breaks into their apartments. But that’s when things begin to disintegrate for her a little.

R: But those are all understandable—I don’t think she’s a different person, and I’m not even sure I would say that’s unreliable, as you say, but perhaps that’s responsive to these odd things that are going on.
…
A: Well, I love you for that because that means you really connected to her. You know, a lot of people didn’t like her—I remember somebody wrote me an angry email saying, “How could she break into her tenants apartments?”

R: Angry email!

A: Yeah, I got an angry email! And I said, you know, this is a woman who’s trying so hard to figure out why her tenant disappeared and why her world is evading her control. Her plans are being greatly disrupted and this is her way, she thinks, of making things safer even though it might be a risky decision.

R: I thought her tenants were—I just saw those as gestures of establishing a family.

A: Yes! Absolutely.

R: And I thought it was interesting because they were interesting sort of characters…

A: Yeah! And I think, why does a woman who says she wants to be alone fill her apartment with tenants, right? She doesn’t. And she fights her wanting to love them and know them better. She’s a shy woman in certain ways—a private woman. But you’re exactly right—in some ways she’s trying to take them into her. You’re a good reader! I love you.

R: Thank you.

A: I do, I love you.

R: [chuckles]

A: Where have you been all my life?

R: So there’s a chance that if I brought my dog you’d still pay attention to me?

A: Yeah, now I don’t care about your dog. Now it’s all you. And your cigar.

R: Anyway . . . So you started with the character…

A: The voice, yeah.

R: The voice. And—don’t take this the wrong way but is there a plot?

A: [laughs] Yeah, I think there is. I think the minute that Hope comes in and is living over her head and is going through a disruption in her own love life, Celia despite herself is extraordinarily fascinated by her and is trying not to be. And when Hope takes up with Les, and obviously some dangerous stuff’s going on up there, Celia’s in a quandary because she doesn’t know whether to intervene or not. She tells herself she’s not going to but of course she does intervene. She tries to get them to stop doing what they’re doing. And then of course when Hope comes, which is a test of Celia’s control of her own home, Mr. Coughlin disappears. So I think if there’s a plot it’s a story about Celia and her relationship to these people, to these tenants, and how all of these situations which were static for a while become wildly chaotic.

R: Well the reason I ask is because for both of those characters, what will happen—what remains in the future—is still very open. It’s not determined. I don’t conclude anything about Hope or Celia at the end of the story, except for what was the sort of climax.

A: Well I hate to say what the climax is because it’d be a spoiler but I think you know when it was, when Celia goes up there to kick her out and something else happens. That was something else I was driving toward because I wanted women who were not young to be sexy and interesting …Well, I wanted to know if… again, women who are older who are interesting for their complex desires and their complexity generally, and sexually interesting as well. I wanted—there’s a lot of dark sex in this book, as that Boston Globe review seemed to focus on overly—I wanted to get to a moment of tenderness between these women, where Celia can give Hope something that her husband gave to her, and it not necessarily be about body parts or about bending anybody over a coffee table.

R: That’s a little hard, isn’t it.

A: [laughs] You’re right. How about a kitchen table?

R: You’d have to be really in good shape, you know…

A: Well, you can do it on your knees!

R: Are there still coffee tables?

A: Sure!

R: Do you have a coffee table?

A: I have a coffee table!

R: I don’t have a coffee table.

A: You don’t? Do you want one?

R: No.

A: Okay.

R: I have little nesting tables but… Anyway… Here’s the thing: it’s sort of a cliché that older men seem to be attracted to young women and young girls.

A: They definitely are.

R: I won’t say that I don’t notice a pretty girl
…
A: Of course!

R: But I notice lots of people. So frankly, I can’t see going out with a… when I was 50 years old I went out with a woman who was in her late 20s.

A: Wow! What was that like?

R: [laughs] Yeah, wow.

A: She must have had nice skin.

R: She had a nice ass.

A: Oh, yeah.

R: It was clear to me then. But the thing is, when I mentioned Che Guevara and she didn’t know who Che Guevara was, that’s when it first occurred to me that there’s this whole…

A: The life experience.

R: There’s a cultural… the window of cultural knowledge gets smaller and smaller the younger you get. Forget about knowledge, just even experience and… I don’t see the attraction, really.

A: There’s some really fundamental things you can’t share and you’re explaining your life much more than just sort of being in sync with these things. And these are ways you get to know someone, because if it was someone in your generation and you mentioned Che Guevara, you’ll get her response and that’s a way in. And instead for your twentysomething friend you’re educating her to certain things and she’s probably not going to have as pure a response to it because in fact you’re leading her there.

R: Yeah, exactly.

A: But it must have been fun.

R: At the end of writing this book, did you feel like you wrote what you had set out to write?

A: I do. I think I did because I feel like I got—Celia is defiant also, in certain ways, and at the end, she’s changed but she’s not a whole different person, right? She’s got Hope’s hand in her hand and she’s got Leo’s hand on her knee—she’s part of the party, she’s part of what’s going on, whereas she had been outside of it. But she’s still going to keep her vigil to her husband in many ways; she’s still going to be a person who has a secret that she really hasn’t told anybody but the reader. So, yeah, I wanted a woman who was private, who was defiant; I wanted a woman whose hunger gets the best of her, I think in really good ways, despite the fact that she’s trying to control her hunger a little bit. I got to some stuff about sex and sensuality that I was really interested in. I got to some stuff about how we live with other people when we can hear them on the other side of our walls—how we live in private and how sometimes when we’re trying to live in private we’re still living publicly in a funny way. I know when my neighbors shower, I know when they make love…

R: So when you go to Yaddo or MacDowell what’s that like for you, given that you’re an urban…?

A: Oh I love it! You know, all I’m longing for is to just shake my boots of the city but because my work and my writers mean so much to me…

R: So muchis conducted via mobile/wireless devices now
.
A: Thank you for telling me that! Between you and me, it would be great to live points north, it would be great to live in a place where when I write my rent check I don’t feel like I want to cry a little—just a little.

R: [laughs]

A: Money that I’m never going to see again.

R: Are you in Brooklyn?

A: Brooklyn Heights, which is wooof—that’s even more expensive.

R: So you haven’t amassed a large enough fortune to be able to buy something in Brooklyn?

A: I’ve saved some dough but on a publishing salary all these years—I think my first job in publishing was at Pocket Books at Simon & Schuster, I think they paid me eighteen-two… thankfully it’s gotten better since then.

R: It has.

A: But it’s still a salary, my father says, “It’s criminal to live on that.” [laughs]

R: It’s criminal to live in an expensive area where you’re giving much of your income to rent…

A: I know. Well what happens in New York I think is, when I first got to Brooklyn Heights it wasn’t very expensive. I moved there in ’91 the first time. Then I had a rent controlled apartment there for ages, over a Greek restaurant so it was constantly filled with the smoke of grilled meat, but then when I met this guy and we liked each other we thought, “Maybe we should try to live together”, and that’s when the really exorbitant rent came into it, because as Johnny Cash said, if you want to make a relationship work you both should have your own bathrooms. So I found us a place…

R: He said that?

A: He did.He did, somebody asked him, What made your marriage last so long, what makes a marriage work? And he said separate bathrooms. And I really think it saved Cody and me, to be honest ‘cause that man doesn’t know from cleaning. At all.

R: [laughs]

A: But it’s enough. I think we’ve realized we can live together and now we can spread our wings into cheaper places. You also fall in love with your neighborhood in Brooklyn, it becomes your sanctuary against all the chaos and noise and nonsense. And it is a cool neighborhood—okay, let me go over it. Norman Mailer lived there until he passed, not so long ago; Walt Whitman, of course; Truman Capote, Arthur Miller…

R: They’re all dead!

A: But I like ghosts!

R: [laughs]

A: Jennifer Egan lives there right now, although I leave her alone, of course, and other writers are nearby.

R: Where is Jonathan, oh, he’s out on the West Coast, at Pomona College, right?

A: Yeah, he lived in Boerum Hill for ages so he was close by. Jonathan Ames is still there in Boerum Hill, Martin Amis I guess just moved to the area, I don’t know where, but somewhere in the area. A good writer named Samantha Gillison doesn’t live so far away—she’s quite talented. There’s a bunch of writers—what did Jonathan say? Brooklyn in cancerous with novelists? Jonathan Lethem.

R: I thought everyone had said something like that.

A: Yeah. But this is one who’d surely like to go if she could and still do her job to the best of her ability.

R: I was talking to a photographer who lives here but his son now lives in Brooklyn and he was sort of laughing about it, you know, because it’s the center of hip-dom.

A: It wasn’t when I moved there, you want to know? In fact, men would say, I can’t date you, you live in Brooklyn! You’re a bridge and tunnel girl and I’d be like,” Hey buddy, fuck you!” But I liked it.

R: Did people actually say that to you?

A: Yeah, they said, “Dating you is going to be…” —often things in New York are about logistics—where do you live? How do I get to you? What subway? What taxi?

R: Well, I understand that.

A: Yeah, but if you like a girl enough just get on the goddamn subway! I’ll get on the subway.

R: If you like a guy enough you just get on the subway.

A: Get on the subway!

R: So you published this book—it was an effort of two years, three years, more?

A: Well, it was since 2009 and I stopped writing it—I probably finished it in 2011 but then I tweaked it. So two years and then tweakies, some tweaky time here and there.

R: So Picador, which normally doesn’t publish hardcovers… who’s the editor?

A: Yeah! They’re starting… it’s Anna deVries, she used to be at Scribner and she did more crime then, although she did a few literary titles. Now she’s going to do it all… and the publisher Stephen Morrison came over from Penguin and they want to start this hardcover line…

(Editor’s note:Since this interview Picador has published 30 hardcovers)

R: They were hardcover for a while, in the States.

A: In the States and then they did mostly paperbacks, and now they’re going back to it with gusto. They call me the driver, which is nice, of their hardcover line.

R: So has your life always been about reading and writing and writers?

A: It certainly has since my professional life; it really has. Since I was about 21, 22.

R: In this kind of professional life seems to be all-encompassing—you don’t skydive do you?

A: No…

R: You’re not heavily into golf.

A: No, but my father is so I watch a lot of golf.

R: You watch a lot of golf?

A: Yeah, I watch a lot of golf with him! He’s like, you’re watching? Because I was the youngest of three girls, he needed a boy so I watch a lot of sports with him. I also used to watch a lot of Star Trek with him.

R: Really? Did you like Star Trek?

A: I really liked it. The original one.

R: I’ve never like it.

A: Oh, how can you not like it?

R: So many of these programs, I just…

A: How about the ones from the 70s though? 60s and 70s. You didn’t like it?

R: No. I don’t remember one good television program from the 70s.

A: Really?

R: Name one.

A: Well, Star Trek.

R: So we know you like Star Trek.

A: Yeah. Name another?

R: Yeah.

A: Wasn’t the Archie Bunker…

R: That was, okay, All in the Family…

A: That’s pretty fucking good, right? Good writing; he was a crazy character. We couldn’t watch him in our house because my mother had a mean alcoholic father and he reminded her of him too much. But I do know people who feel almost a religious sensibility about All in…

R: What was the Fonz?

A: Happy Days. I liked Happy Days alright. Well, see I was a kid then…

R: Mod Squad very early in the 70s. The Brady Bunch.

A: The Brady Bunch. Gilligan’s Island, was that the 70s too?

R: People loved Gilligan’s Island. See, I never…

A: What about the Monkees?

R: I didn’t even like them as a group.

A: I understand. But if you’re a little girl as I was, because I was only seeing them in reruns at that point, I think—I was born in ’69… so I just thought they were damn cute and energetic.

R: Che Guevara.

A: Yeah, well I know who that is. I’m old enough for that, I’m 43 now, going to be 44 shortly. So don’t you worry, I know my revolutionaries.

R: Do you consider yourself old?

A: I consider myself a mature middle-aged woman but what’s interesting—I think because I’m petite, and bouncy and perky to some, that I am perceived as quite young.

R: But do you feel any sort of… not subliminal but… maybe subliminal signals that you should be thinking of yourself as an old woman?

A: Oh sure, I mean I think that’s one of the reasons I was so interested in Celia and Hope because here are women who are older, who are going through great upsets in their life and what does that mean for your identity? Your husband dies, the other woman’s husband falls in love with a younger woman. I’m beginning to do that: I’m beginning to think, yeah, I’m not so young anymore and I’m curious about it.

R: Not because of yourself?

A: You mean I don’t feel like I’m old? I definitely feel like I’m beginning to…

R: Are there signals, things that sort of, everyday life… if people stopped asking you for your ID…

A: Well in New York it’s mandatory now, everybody asks so they still do and I always laugh about it but there are signals. And also, some men don’t look at me anymore. And, you know, I used to get looked at a fair amount.

R: That’s because you were in a Norma Kamali fringe dress… [laughs]

A: [laughs]

R: So, being the young kid that you are, you’ve got a lot of life to live—what do you think about for your future?

A: Well I’m going to write a couple more books. I’m going to try to get out of New York. I’m going to do some traveling, I hope—my book sold in a few countries so that’s exciting. I used to live in Paris. Oh! That’s what you asked me—you asked me, What did you do besides this, it’s all encompassing; it is, but I speak French, I go there as often as I can. Not in the past few years, it’s true, I’ve been taken up with work. I do the yoga. I walk a lot—I’m a big walker, I like to walk and look. And I think recreationally dated for a long time.

R: Was it fun?

A: It was! In New York it can be a little treacherous, but it was fun.

R: You have a good sense of… you’re alert about who’s dangerous and…?

A: Yeah, sure. I think I also have a good sense—and I hope it comes out through the writing, but who knows—of the traffic between men and women and the sexual traffic between men and women. All that good stuff. I’ve had some great relationships—I had some really lousy ones too but they taught me a lot too.

R: So what is it about France—why didn’t you ever end up at one of those high-paying Conde Nast fashion magazines where they accept fiction, don’t they?

A: Nobody there publishes fiction anymore except for the New Yorker. Vogue doesn’t; the Atlantic still does but they’re not owned by Conde Nast…

R: Did Mirabella publish fiction?

A: No, not to my knowledge although Good Housekeeping did for a long time… maybe Marie Claire did for a brief time. It might be interesting to look that up.

R: I think Marie Claire might have because for some reason I thought that William Boyd’s wife worked there…

A: Cosmopolitan did, remember?

R: Oh yeah. Not that I read them…

A: They were kind of racy.

R: So you didn’t end up at one of those places where you could have made lots of money…

A: Well this goes to show you how dumb I am—I was offered three jobs out of college: the paying job at Simon & Schuster in pocket books, a job at Christian Dior to basically man the receptionist’s desk but that’s how they start all the ladies, and I would wear fabulous clothes and get paid much more than I was getting paid at Simon & Schuster…

R: And get invited to a lot of…

A: Yeah! Meet some rich fellas… and then the third job—and this is the one I feel I should have taken—was the Macneil Lehrer News Hour at the time but it was only 100 dollars a week or something and I thought I should get a real salary. So I took the job at Simon & Schuster. And got screamed at by Judith Regan, she was working there then. She wasn’t my boss though…

R: You know, I don’t know her, of course, but for me the public perception of her—in interviews—she doesn’t strike me as an attractive person but I think she published Jess Walter, didn’t she?

A: She did! She discovered and published him.

R: And he speaks really highly of her—he loves her.

A: He loves her. And he should! The thing about Judith is she’s really fiercely loyal to her writers. She’ll do anything for them, and I think as a writer that feels awful good.
And I do that with my writers. I’ll take care of them.

R: Like the way your call them “your” writers.

A: I feel like they’re mine. We work really closely together—Jess and I have over the years and we’re also very good friends, we talk a lot—in fact I’ll probably call him about this after we’re done. Margaret Atwood and I have worked a lot together over the years; Joyce Carol Oates; James Elroy and I have worked a lot, a lot together.

R: [laughs] James!

A: Have you met him?

R: Yeah! I’ve interviewed him three or four times in person.

A: Around here?

R: Yeah.

A: He’s funny.

R: Very funny. Although a little droll.

R: So I’ve got to get going. How could we end this conversation with a bang?

A: I don’t know…

R: What would be the penultimate… well we can’t. So you have to promise to talk to me for the next novel.

A: Oh, yeah.

R: Wouldn’t you say this is part one?

A: Let’s say it! This is part one. Let’s never end this conversation.

R: Never-ending.

Amy Grace Loyd [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Currently reading A Corner of the World by Mylene Fernandez Pintado (City Lights)

Me and Allan (Gurganus) Part I (Local Souls)

I am going to assume that if your gaze has landed on this page, you know something about novelist Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All).Thusly relieved of the task of introducing this fine writer I need only add that this is my third conversation with him, a skein that commenced in 1997 with his second published novel Plays Well With Others and has continued now with his recently published litter of novellas, Local Souls.

Chatting with Allan, a warm and courtly North Carolingian, has all the feel and ambience of the kind of thing one enjoys passing a leisurely afternoon on his front porch—which is to say his joyfulness in conversation matches that found in his prose.

Local Souls by Allan Gurganus

RB: How are you?

AG: I’m pretty good. Being with readers is very reassuring. You forget that they still exist.

RB: This is early in the publication life of Local Souls; you assume that the readers that show up at events know your work?

AG: Many of them do, because they bring their copies and see they are dog-eared and with pieces post it attached—

RB: —coffee circles on the cover.

AG: I love that. And sun tan lotion makes me very happy.

RB: In the book collecting world that’s frowned upon. I guess in the 19th century the most valuable books were those that hasn’t had the plats split apart

AG: Exactly, that right. The uncut pages. Premiums on virgins. Virginity is highly overrated.

RB: I have vast multitudes of signed 1st editions and they are besmirched with all sorts of substances.
AG: I love that. People apologize. You must have an amazing collection by now.

RB: Well yeah, it’s pretty good.

AG: Isn’t it thrilling about Alice Munro winning the Nobel? I am so happy about that.

RB: Every laureate makes a speech but she is not going to the ceremony. I wonder if she will provide some kind of valedictory.

AG: Oh, is she not going? She has cancer, apparently. Such a shame. It happened maybe 2 years too late. Her lover is dead. I can’t believe it when writers say they’ve stopped writing. Philip Roth and Alice Munro.

RB: Well, we’ll see. Vonnegut announced he would stop writing and didn’t.

AG: I think it’s an impossible habit to break. Even if you know you are writing stuff that you know is not your very best. It’s an irresistible habit. I find not writing on tour excruciating.

RB: Early in Local Souls (the 1st novella) you say a writer is always writing.

AG: Yeah, exactly. You are always gathering and eavesdropping and spying. And formulating.

RB: Is that true of all writers? Or is that your definition of a writer?

AG: That’s what draws you to the occupation.

RB: An excuse to be nosey? (laughs)

AG: Absolutely. I saw a thing in Memphis —I saw 2 things is Memphis that were exciting to me fictionally. One was a bail bondsman whose company was “Free At Last Bail Bonds”. I don’t think Dr. King had that in mind when he said that.

RB: It was put to good use

AG: That’s right. The other thing was I saw a very well dressed 68-year-old society lady in patent leather pumps at an ATM machine being trained by a man who was about 70, in how to use her 1st ATM cash card. And it was clear that she was terrified. She was putting it in the wrong way. It’s a wonderful beginning of a story.

RB: What do you imagine her life was like? Did she know how to operate a vacuum cleaner?

AG: Oh, never. I don’t think she knew how to write a check to t he maid who ran the vacuum cleaner. But the man with her seemed to me to be the brother of her husband who just died. And she’d been one of these coddled impeded people. And was terrified—

RB: What do you mean by impeded?

AG: By making people helpless you foot bind them.

RB: Infantilize them?

AG: Absolutely.

RB: That reminds me, did you make up the word ‘sogged’ [to describe a rain soaked coat]?

AG: I did, yeah; it seemed the only word that I could think of.

RB: What’s a novella?

AG: It’s a work of a certain length that has something wrong with it.

RB: (laughs)

AG: Ideally it’s a unit that you can pick up after dinner and finish by bedtime. That’s Peter Taylor’s definition.

RB: Kind of an ad hoc description—it depends on how long you stay up after dinner.

AG: I think it means that you leave out the secondary characters. It’s ideally suited for stories about obsessions—single-minded quests—“I love my child too much.” “I made a fatal mistake and spent my life trying to recapture what I gave away.”

RB: Jim Harrison is the only author I can think of who regularly writes novellas.

AG: Steven Millhauser does a lot—he’s really good.

RB: Andre Dubus just published a volume [Dirty Love] with a novella.

AG: My friend Lee Smith was a t a 5th grade school session as a visiting writer. And her 1st question came from a little girl, “Is a novella a novel written by a girl?”
Lee said it would have been too cruel to say,”No.” The girl was so game to ask the 1st question.

RB: I like the definition that says there is something wrong with a novella. Had the stories in Local Souls gone right they would have been novels?

AG: I think it’s a service to the reader to gut out the carbs and give you pure protein—like eating tuna fish out of a can at the kitchen sink.

RB: That sounds like one of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for writing

AG: Oh does it, good?

Allan Gurgnaus (photo by Robert Birnbaum)

RB: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

AG: That’s great. A lot of green scenery needs to go. I am not really interested in purple mountains majesty on the page. It aerates too much the interior obsessions and struggles of the writer. I want people to be completely in the reality of the character.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus

RB: In the first story, you are the narrator/character.

AG: Oh absolutely. There is no question .Its an invitation to the reader to participate in the construction of the piece. And that piece was fascinating to write. It was an attempt to simulate a documentary by gathering the clues; you are with him as he makes it all up out of bare- boned reality. I am very interested in Jim Thomson. He’s an underestimated crime writer and really a great writer in his best book. The Killer Inside Me is a terrifying —a beautiful book. And in a way the whodunit still has tremendous vitality as a pattern for how me move through fiction. A crime is created on the first page and resolved on the last page.

RB: I really enjoy crime stories. There is the tendency of crime writers to create series —which lost their vitality more or less quickly. And by the way, in Elmore Leonard, the crime is not important to his stories.

AG: In a way the crime is the fillip, the sorry excuse— so you can hear those guys who are so stupid and so smart at the same time, talk. It’s so thrilling to see on the page.Since Flannery O’Connor he has best ear in American fiction—maybe with Grace Paley. I love reading that dialogue.

RB: And Leonard makes it easy for screen adaptation—the dialogue doesn’t need to be tampered with. Getting back to ‘sogged’ when I went back to reread your stories I was struck by the wonderful solecisms.

AG: Shakespeare was always turning nouns into verbs.

RB: That would be the beauty of the English language.

AG: Exactly, that’s how it happens —the regeneration, the resurrection. There are instances where there is no legal verb. In White People I have an angel falling out of the sky on to green grass. And I used the word ‘twunk’, I had a dream in which an angel fell and that was exactly the sound. I think what we are trying to do as writers, in a way, is develop an idiomatic language that’s separate from conventional Strunk & White language. That’s a kind of emotional short hand for the characters and should vary from piece to piece but it takes a while for the reader to learn this news language. But once they have got it they are that much closer to the center of the character.

RB: Is there a conscious effort?

AG: In the heat of the moment you develop—

RB: For the reader?

AG: It shouldn’t be too conscious. It shouldn’t be like reading Finnegan’s Wake. You have to meet people half way.

RB: I didn’t catch some of this on my first reading. What’s mind set when you are reading something for the 2nd time?

AG: You see the construction much more consciously. I am always doing battle with copy editors —you know, in Saints Have Mothers, the self reported IQ of Jean Mulray keeps rising by 22 points by the end. The copyeditors were having an orgasm having caught me in this mistake. I told them there may be accidents in my work but there are no mistakes. I really meant that. I had to right a whole new chapter to justify myself to this anonymous lady.

RB: You could have simply pointed out that this was a novel, a fiction.

AG: I tried to do that but those distinctions are breaking down. Americans are so fact loving as a people that most of the questions you get at readings are, “This is pretty much what happened, right?” No, this is not. The very phrase ‘fiction’ is based on the word ‘fashioned’ meaning forged or created, hand made. The question is what of the inventions that you have put in this book, is the craziest and the most successful to you? That would be the question I ‘d like asked. I have handy example, which for me was mind-boggling. In Decoy, I needed a disease—this is what I do to my poor characters. Drowning, mortification of the flesh is not enough. N-n-n-n-n-no, they have to have a fated inherited disease. So I made up a disease. Exercising all rights of fiction. The disease was patrilineal —you got it form your dad, from male to male. It’s a heart disease that retains all the cholesterol you have ever eaten, in your body. It turns you into a crystal palace of cholesterol. And I had a great Gothic Edgar Alan Poe time imagining this. I actually had dates when the body began to be impeded—about 30-35. Then dead, conventionally by 50-51, something like that. I have a next-door neighbor who is a retired famous cardiologist. He is entering his 80’s. He is so famous he did a triple by pass on the Sultan of Brunei. When he came to Duke University, he brought his wives, his children his rugs and his security force. And he rented the university hotel. The rugs were stacked so high that you had to crawl into the rooms (that’s his wealth). It’s like traveling with Metropolitan Museum. And they have to use them to make them better. Anyway, —

RB: Anyway—

AG: Moving right along—you see, you thought I lost the thread. You thought I had, but n-o-o-o-o I hadn’t.

RB: No, I was thinking there’s a story.

AG: Exactly. So I decided I have the world’s leading cardiologist living next door, idled. I take advantage of his expertise and humor him and build bridges as father used to say, by asking him if such a thing could be possible. So went over with my little note pad and laid out this fictitious disease. It took me about 10 minutes to lay out all the specs of the disease. So I asked is such a thing possible. And he said is such a thing possible along side familial chloresterolemia? And I said, “What’s familial chloresterolemia?” “The disease you just described for the last 10 minutes.” To the day, I had described a disease that preexisted me. I never read about it. Or known anyone who had it. I made it up. Its real.

RB: But rare.

AG: It’s rare, thank god for the poor sufferers. But even the name chloresterolemia, to put the Latin up front like that—I couldn’t have done better in my wildest dreams. So when people say, “This story is real, you read in a newspaper, right? Right! Wrong! The mystical stuff is the stuff that you invent most fancifully and that somehow comes to validate you and the fiction.

RB: I hear from writers that readers seem to have an expectation that everything is factual.

AG: Oh god, its tedious. I think it’s a great age for non-fiction but I also think it’s a great age for fiction. But in the horserace —

RB: May be not a great age for reading.

AG: Its not. I have seen in the —I read in Seattle 12 years ago, I had 120 people. I read in Seattle, that if anything has gotten more praise than the last book, 11 people turn up. I flew 3000 miles to Seattle, which is supposed to be one of the great book towns —

RB: At Elliot Bay?

AG: At Elliot Bay.

RB: What explains that?

AG: I don’t know but I see that the promise of the book has receded. For instance, I have never not been on All Things Considered. For every book I have written since ’89. They don’t really do books anymore. Only books about the burning of the Koran. Or something sensational.

RB: Tiger mothers?

AG: Yeah, exactly. And Terry Gross is retired. So now we have to do things like writing essays for the Times and the Wall St Journal.

RB: Like “On Collecting”[written for the NY Times].

AG: Like that and inventing diseases and whatever else, in order to see your name in the paper. It’s changed. Unfortunately it’s too late for me to retool. All I ever wanted to do was write a great book. And I’m not changing.

RB: Are you going take in boarders or something?

AG: I guess so. Or become a callboy. Except nobody called—I hate when that happens.

RB: We have it wrong. Its not about the decline of reading its about the decline of education.

AG: Well, it’s true.

RB: As long as the emphasis radically shifts from creating the whole person and the humanities to vocational guidance and training what is in it for students to read?

AG: It’s great to put it in that context. That’s what the Republican majority is doing by cutting education

RB: Everyone is doing it—the great majority of policy makers see education as a career strategy, there is no learning for learning’s sake. Nicholson Baker wrote in Harpers that Algebra shouldn’t be required as part of the Core. Which is considered a gateway course (but mostly and obstacle) to college. How much do you use Algebra in your life?

AG: I couldn’t use it. That’s a great point. Talk about the dumbing down of America as something in the future—that happened decades ago and we are reaping the benefit. Its scary it really is. And the absolute passivity of whatever comes down it’s a scary time. Those 40 representatives, so-called, could have just pushed right on into full coup. That was the idea. Its spooky and we are entranced and narcotized with our gizmos and I am as guilty as the next person. I never had an IPhone until I went on this tour and now I feel like I have a little white kitten upstairs and I leave milk and cookies for it in a shoe box by the bed. That’s my favorite little thing.

RB: I just realized I hate football. My son plays for his high school.

AG: Oh god.

RB: And I can’t stop watching it because I have been watching it since childhood. But I hate it.

AG: Its horrible. It’s gladiatorial. Its white people in the stands watching under cashmere blankets watching the underclass kill each other. Its bear baiting, is what it is.

RB: Daniel Woodrell in The Bayou Trilogy has a funny take on college football —essentially characterizing the games as between Alabama’s felons and Florida States’ criminals.

AG: I was just in Oxford, Mississippi before the LSU game. LSU fans are notorious for coming with broken coca cola bottles and throwing them into the stands. People are afraid to go out on the street. The marauding hordes have arrived.

RB: Wow, sounds like English soccer fans.

AG: The thugs. Its inevitable that they imitate on the street what they see on the field.

RB: Wasn’t there some incident where an opposing fan chopped down a tree on the Auburn Campus?

AG: That was horrible.

RB: You wrote somewhere you liked to find humor in the most horrible circumstances

AG: Yeah. I want to write the funniest books possible about the worst things that can happen.

RB: Why is that?

AG: There’s where the energy is and redemption is and that’s where the truth is. We are all in for a terrible row of disasters. The flood that I described in Decoy is predicated on flood that took out 30% of the houses in my hometown overnight. 17 feet of water hit the town. Essentially the Atlantic Ocean came 150 miles inland in 1999. It preceded Katrina—by the time Katrina hit everybody in my town had been there and done that. They will never get back into their houses. We just move on.

RB: I just read Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly’s The Tilted World. Its about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. And in the last chapter one of the characters talks about what he will tell his children and mentions that this greatest of natural disasters was very much ignored around the country and would have been dealt with differently had it taken place in New England.

RB: What struck me living through this real flood—I was not living in the town at the time. My brother got on the phone and said, ”Come now.” And I said, “Well I have a dentist appointment.” “Cancel. Come now.” [He] Being a man of few words, I got in the car and went. And instances of such heroism from the least likely people. And like Doc in the novella [Decoy], the person who seems the most set up and most revered can bear anything but to lose what he’s hand made. He can’t sacrifice his art. And its sort of way of subjecting your art work to difficulty. It has to float—I mean, you carve a decoy so it can float away on a flood. And it floats away; a highly successful and you’re devastated because you have lost your beauty—

RB: Do you know Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell?

AG: I know her name but I don’t know the book.

RB: She chose 6 historic natural disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Katrina and pointed out that in those calamities, that people banded together and formed communities of aid and comfort.

AG: Think about 9/11—people carrying wheelchair victims 90 floors down the stairs. We forget that. Those instances of beauty and of community inspire me. Its what I have instead of god. Community is real, god is fiction. It’s thrilling to see how imaginative people can be. I lived through a lot of hurricanes growing up in North Carolina. One of the most recent, Fran, took out all of the electricity for 8 or 9 days. Which in and of itself is a huge cataclysm for most of us. But I had a gas range and a lot of coffee, which I had ground up in advance, very cleverly.

RB: You could have used a hammer.

AG: That takes a long time—like a mortar and pestle. I had filled the bathtub, so I had a lot of water. And I made coffee for my neighbors. I am a total coffee addict. And I learned when they need their coffee and what they took in their coffee. And I have never had such gratitude. It was like doing a sexual favor for old lady next door.

RB: That’s pretty thoughtful. Do you use a burr grinder or a blade [grinder]? Or the old hand burr grinder?

AG: Exactly. It was so simple top do and so powerful. And I felt closer to the people and we also did the thing that we did in Decoy of pooling all our frozen food, delicacies, and putting them in a giant pot. It was one the best things I have eaten I my life. Sitting outside behind a darkened house-

RB: A peasant meal.

AG: Right, whatever you have, squirrel, okra, weeds, what the hell—it was thrilling

RB: People get great pleasure from doing acts of kindness.

AG: I love the most basic definition —which kin and kindness are from the same root. So to the extent that you are kind to somebody you are demonstrating how like them you are. And that lines up the pheromones like nothing else in the world—to know that you are part of a huge tribe.

RB: That’s what makes the Dalai Llama so attractive —preaching kindness.

AG: Absolutely. It’s a profound concept. And it’s difficult to practice. I swear this is my mantra, my daily activity, to try to make everybody you contact in a course of a day, incrementally better about themselves for having seen you. It’s incredible—

RB: A lesson often learned later in life.

AG: It does come later. The slash and burn days are gone, yeah.

Waiter tries to take our stuff—we humorously protest.

RB: We were somewhere

AG: —before they took our food away. We were talking about kindness
RB: There is that old saw about having two lives, one is the life you learn with and one is the life you live what you have learned.

AG: I am 66. I love this age. I love it.

RB: I am older than you. So remember that.

AG: All right sir, I can take lessons. Can I sit in your lap and get counsel, Santa?

RB: How often do you run into people that you don’t know?

AG: Not all the time. I live in a village of 6 thousand and when I walk around town the bookstore has my books in the window. It’s a Jimmy Stewart kind of reality.

RB: Is there a street named for you?

AG: Not yet.

Allan Gurganus (photo by Robert Birnbaum)

RB: Anything that commemorates your existence?

AG: Yes, my hometown library has a life size portrait of me. I should say that with shame—its actually quite a good painting apart from its likeness to me.

RB: And the bronze statue?

AG: That comes later. I don’t care about post humus; I want it now, baby. You know that Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again. The reason he has to say that is because he used every secret about Ashville in his trashy book. He was so mean to the people who helped him. I work from an opposite principle—kin and kindness have their rewards. Not just on the page but in reality and community.

RB: Did you think this was what you were going to when you were a young pup in NYC?

AG: I though I was going to be a painter until I was inducted into the US Navy.

RB: I meant did you think you were going to return to rustic North Carolina?

AG: I didn’t think that until the AIDS pandemic. Until I lost 30 of the most adorable people that I had known. You reach a point where you have to start over. You are lucky of you can start over—if you are one of the survivors who can say I will remember all these people and I will take these memories into my new friends. But I couldn’t do it on the same streets where all this terrible stuff had happened.

RB: And now when you are in New York?

AG: I enjoy it. I love it. I feel very quickened by it. It sis much more congested and expensive, needless to say. But every block has associations for me. There is a kind of default setting. I think we all have. The people who go back to Ireland to die, and they haven’t seen it in 60 years. The minute they get to the dock they are like, ”Hah! Bye bye.” For me the course of least resistance was to know all the sounds and smells of this particular landscape. And it’s been extremely consoling. I have a garden and old house that I fixed up. I love it. I love being there. And I learn a lot. Its almost the narrative inspiration is permeable. You get through the skin.

RB: Well, North Carolina has a lot of writers living there

AG: Well, in my little town it could be 30 %. When I moved there 21 years ago it was me and the hardware store. I like living where I do and then going from there. The book is being translated into a lot of languages. I’ll go to countries, each in turn—there is no way like getting to know a country like having a book in their language. Its exciting dealing with translators and the questions that they ask.

RB: Any non-traditional languages?

AG: Mostly French, German, And Italian. I have things in Japanese. I just love to look at the text though I have no idea what I am seeing. The questions that come are fascinating. Word choices and—

RB: You’ll get questions about ‘sogged’.

AG: I’m ready. I am prepared to defend it in any language. It’s an underpaid and under appreciated occupation. Astonishing artistry.

Allan Gurganus circa 1991 (photo, Robert Birnbaum)

Note to you: I am suspending my customary practice of publishing an interview in totality. In this case my conversation with Allan Gurganus was about 90 minutes in duration (which flew by as we were engaged in it) and I fear that a complete transcript would tax all but the most devoted readers. Thus, you can, if you made it this far, in the fullness of time, look forward to a Part II.

Currently reading The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig
by Stefan Zweig translated by Anthea Bell (Pushkin Press)

Commonplace Book

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“The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”- Anatole France

Live with intention, Walk to the edge, Listen hard, Practice wellness, Play with abandon, Laugh, Choose with no regret
Continue to learn, Appreciate your friends, Do what you love, Live as if this is all there is. Mary Anne Radmacher

I have one secret. You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That’s the only secret. Is there another one? 
- Philip Glass.

Our Man in Boston (photo: Ethan Rutherford)

He runs the Cassidy crime family. Little people with enormous heads, every one if them. And they’ve all have been shot in the head, and they never die. They believe it’s the luck of the Irish—they walk around thinking they were all born lucky—and it never occurred to any them yet that if they were that fucking lucky, they wouldn’t keep getting shot—TRAIN by Pete Dexter

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Howard Zinn (Photograph: Robert Birnbaum

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problems of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed—which are at the root of most punished crimes. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished—Howard Zinn

I am forever astonished that when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country, I faced young men who were aghast at the behaviour of experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who, in a matter of months, were brought into the military and performed without compunction actions that made shocking the victim seem pallid. In this respect they are no better and no worse that human beings of any other era who lend themselves to the purposes of authority and become instruments in its destructive processes—Stanley Milgram

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to came at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick: you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of al l perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living id all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you. Philip Roth
American Pastoral

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

The world’s “freest” country has the highest number in prison—Arundhati Roy

Frankly, I have no mind for rational solutions to these immense problems. Nothing I ever hear from Washington DC has any relationship with the reality I know down here. I’m seeing, delirium, hunger, acute suffering, which are not solved, assuaged or aired by the stentorian fart breath of the House and Senate….I’m also wondering if it behooves a writer to try to be right. Yeats warned about cutting off a horses legs to get it into a box. Simon Ortiz, the grand Acomo Pueblo poet, said that there are no truths, only stories….A historian might very well consider the validity of the Gadsen Purchase, wherein we bought my locale for fifty-two cents an acre from a group of Mexicans that had no right to sell it. The United Nations would question our right to take all of the Colorado River’s water, leaving the estuarine area in Mexico as dry as the bones their people leave up here in the desert. A true disciple of Jesus would say that we have to do something about these desperate people, though this is the smallest voice of all. Most politicians have the same moral imperative as a cancer cell: continue what you’ re up to at all costs. Mean while the xenophobes better known as the xenoids, merely jump up an down on the border screeching, surely a full testament to our primate roots. Everyone not already here must be kept out, and anyone here illegally, if not immediately expunged, should be made as uncomfortable as possible…So Ana Claudia crossed with her brother and child into Indian country, walking up a dry wash for forty miles, but when she reached the highway she simply dropped dead near the place where recently a nineteen year old girl also died from thirst with a baby at her breast. The baby was covered with sun blisters, but lived. So did Ana Claudia’s. The particular cruelty of a dry wash is that everywhere there is evidence of water that once passed this way, with the banks verdant with flora. We don’t know how long it took Ana Claudia to walk her only forty miles in America, but we know what her last hours were like. Her body progressed from losing one quart of water to seven quarts: lethargy, increasing pulse, nausea, dizziness ,blue shading of vision, delirium , swelling of the tongue, deafness ,dimness of vision shriveling of the skin, and then death, the fallen body wrenched into a question mark. How could we not wish that politicians on both sides of the border who let her die this way would die in the same manner? But then such people have never missed a single lunch. Ana Claudia Villa Herrera. What a lovely name. Jim Harrison

According to the makers of myth and those who trafficked in cheap lies about human wisdom, the elderly saw goodness in the world that they had not been allowed to see in their youth. But Hackelberry had found the world was the world and it did not change because one happened to age. The same players were always there, regardless of the historical era, he thought, and the ones that heeded most were those that despoiled the earth and led us into wars and provided justifications whenever we felt compelled to commit unconscionable acts against our fellow human beings…when you heard the clock ticking in your life , there was no greater disservice you could do to yourself than to entertain a lie. Death was bad only when you had to face it knowing that you had failed to live during the time allotted to you, or that you had lied to yourself about the realities of the world or willingly listened to the lies of others— James Lee Burke

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets. Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby

“Failure can also be a creative act, Quinn decided. One must look straight ahead as one makes the forced march backward into used history. The death of ambition, gentlemen, is a great impetus for grasping this, and soon you will thrill to how urgently you are moving, how truly exciting this quest for failure can be. What you do not know is that your quest for failure may also fail.”William Kennedy, Chango’s Beads and Two Toned Shoes

“You just take something, and then you do something to it, and then you do something else to it. Keep doing this and pretty soon you’ve got something.”— Jasper Johns

On the poop deck of slave galleys it is possible, at any time and place, as we know, to sing the constellations while the convicts bend over the oars and exhaust themselves in the hold; it is always possible to record the social conversation that takes place on the benches of the amphitheater while the lion is crunching the victim. And it is very hard to make any objections to the art that has known such success in the past. But things have changed somewhat, and the number of convicts and martyrs has increased amazingly over the surface of the globe. In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.” –  Albert Camus “Create Dangerously” in Resistance, Rebellian & Death

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.-C. S. Lewis

“Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work – and what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” – Allen Ginsberg

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize—Voltaire

101 Vagina by Phillip Werner

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read. Nicholson Baker,The Anthologist

Nick Tosches [photo: Robert Birnbaum]

Fuck this world, and fuck those who would impose their frail conceits of good and evil on it. Fuck the black man and the white, the junkie and the crusader, the philosopher and the fool. Fuck those who swagger and those who cower, those who pretend to truth and those who flee from it. Fuck the poet and the book burner, the leader and the led. Fuck God and justice and every other lie that ever held men back. Only when one set it all aflame and forsook it could one return, if only for a breath, to that time of purity when fire was the only philosophy… Nick Tosches

This is America<The Wire

Men were inherently more sentimental than women. Women had to keep moving. Time meant more to them. For girls maturing meant fertility and while boys could screw around to their hearts content, girls got pregnant. The years were demarcated by ovulation and menstruation, the months alive in their bodies, time living within them pushing them forward. Women were human calendars, while men could pretend they were still eighteen. Women were streams, men puddles. Nostalgia was as male as football- Robert Boswell

Journalism is printing what some else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations—George Orwell

Talking with George Saunders

George really needs no introduction —you can go to my other published conversations with him that can be found on the Internet…

George Saunders by Robert Birnbaum

George Saunders: So why the red hat?

Robert Birnbaum: Call me Red as in el Rojo. Why the red hat? I was cold. And I am Jewish*. (takes off hat)

GS: That’s a good haircut.

RB: I do it myself.

GS: Do you?

RB: I don’t want to spend $25 a month. I am a writer. You know what that’s like. Well, you don’t—you’re successful.

GS: No, no, I know.

RB: You wrote the “best book of the year.”

GS: Yeah so far. But it’s only one month in.

RB: I can’t decide whether you were a victim or a beneficiary of two pieces of press earlier this year. There was the New York Times, which asserted that your book was the “best book of the year.” And the other was a piece at Identity Theory opining that you are now repeating yourself.

GS: No I’m not. No I’m not. No I’m not. I don’t know that piece.

RB: (laughs) I didn’t read it—if had read it I wouldn’t have had time to read something else. I read the Times piece and it didn’t read like a review. It read like a press release.

GS: That was in the magazine. It wasn’t really a review as such.

RB: Oh right. It was a profile.

GS: It had a different slant.

RB: And then your publisher took out a full page ad in the Times citing that “best book of the year” quote, reminiscent of movie reviewers who write reviews with lines they hope will be quoted in ads.

GS: Sure.

RB: That was a big expenditure for a short story collection.

GS: Yeah, yeah, I though the whole thing was—

RB:—crazy?

GS: Fun. At 54, at a certain point in your career it’s just nice to see action. It’s more interesting to have something energized happening than not. I kind of think, “Whatever, whatever happens” and—

RB: From where I sit the world of books, literature, and publishing, I think of you as being significant and important. But maybe from where you sit, teaching at a university in the middle of New York state plowing away at your work, you don’t think of yourself as being significant and/or important.

GS: No. Most of the time you are writing, writing the next thing. Or teaching, so it doesn’t seem…maybe if we’d had talked a year ago, before this book came out, I would have said something like “I don’t have a huge audience.” I wonder why not. I wonder if it is—

RB: (laughs)

GS: No, really. Is it something I’m doing wrong—?

RB: What is a huge audience?

GS: Well, I don’t know. I could sense with the other books that they were gaining some critical attention, but they weren’t big sellers and so at the time I wondered, “Is this possibly a result of something I am doing wrong?” In other words, is it the result of some kind of tic I’ve internalized that isn’t necessarily artistically honest but is just a tic, and that has the effect of driving certain readers away? Or am I writing the very best I can and it just so happens I am a small-audience person? So that was on my mind.

RB: That kind of thinking will make you crazy.

GS: I always thought of it as a way of making myself better as a writer. I know so many people—good, smart people, good readers—who would read my stuff and go “Yeah. It’s…interesting. But I don’t quite get it.” So I thought if there was a group of people who were good, smart readers and who, for some reason, were put off by the first three books, it wouldn’t be a sin to try to reach them. I mean, to falsify something would be wrong. But I was willing to think, ”Well, maybe there is something I have taught myself that keeps me small-audience.” And I am not talking about being a mega-seller, just that magical number between—I am not being very articulate, I’m tired.

RB: Have I kept you from your afternoon nap? (laughs)

GS: No, no. So I found myself wondering: What’s the essential difference between guys like Daniil Kharms (a strange, edgy wonderful artist) and Tolstoy (a more accessible wonderful artist)? Which camp do I rightly belong in? Which camp do I want to be in? Tolstoy was a big seller. And, for my money, there’s no greater artist than Tolstoy—not exactly Mr. Compromise. So it felt like a virtuous thing to think about how could I reach that X percentage of readers who would get it and like it if I could just open up a little bit. I thought of that as an aesthetic process—trying to open myself aesthetically.

RB: A way of saying you are trying to make yourself more accessible.

GS: Yeah. I think that’s right. Although…that word has a bad reputation, but I look at it the other way: Was I, through a kind of artistic sloth, habitually making myself inaccessible for reasons that didn’t pay off artistically? Reasons of habit, or fear? And I don’t know the answer because the reception of this book has kind of confused me. With this one, before I sent it out, I would have said: Well, here it is, a fourth weird, dark, small-selling, inaccessible collection. Then it turns out it has sold. So now I’m confused.

RB: Which is why I say, thinking about that can make you crazy.

GS: But you can feel it. I can feel it.

RB: Maybe your sensitivity is skewed?

Tenth of December by George Saunders

GS: With this book, I can feel a difference. You go out and do a reading and there’s four times as many people as there were before and probably half of them are saying, you know, “I have never heard of you before but I am really enjoying this.” So that tells me that for whatever reason, before this book, I wasn’t reaching those people—and it’s not like they aren’t good readers. They get it. But yes, you would drive yourself crazy if you spent too much time thinking about it.

RB: Who knows what the size of the population is of good readers.

GS: That’s right.

RB: I have joked in the past that it’s 400,000 people, constant from generation to generation—

GS: Yeah, I bet that’s right.

RB: Every writer gets different pieces of that group. Some writers get most or all.

GS: These last two months I have been thinking a lot about all of this. But as a benefit of all of these years of writing, my hope is that when I go back next month and start working again it’s not going to be something I’ll be thinking all that much about. I feel like I have pretty good work habits. It’s even hard to know where you stand as a writer, at any give time.

RB: Aw, people like you.

GS: I have always had the nicest audiences and I have no complaints. Even last year, before all of this hoopla, I would have said that I felt like the luckiest guy around. So, at this point in my life, it’s just like—like [Raymond] Carver said, “It’s gravy.” Gravy to get this little boost in interest. And then my responsibility is to use all of this to try and do even better next time.

RB: Are you finding that people have read the book at your readings, laughing at the right places?

GS: Very much. That’s what I mean, why I have been encouraged. If I was getting bigger audiences and going out and bombing I would maybe think they’d just been lured in by the [buzz]. In fact it feels just like it used to feel, only bigger. I’ve been really happy with everything.

RB: I worked in the record business and it’s accepted that wisdom that there is no formula for a hit record. A guy I worked for listened to new records on a cheapo child’s monophonic record player, which replicated the sound of AM (of AM as opposed to FM /frequency modulaton ) radio coming through a small car speaker. He thought that was litmus test for screening hits. But still who knows what makes a hit a priori?

GS: I don’t think you could ever make a good story by thinking if it would sell. But there is some kind of intersection between trying to write as sincerely and truthfully and well as you can and then some idea that a good-hearted reader would connect. That much you can control, I think. But what you can’t control, I am noticing, is once the book is done and it either does really well or really poorly. You can’t predict that. There’s an element that you can’t predict or control. So I don’t think you can make much of it. It’s just luck.

RB: Right. There are too many variables involved in commercial success.

GS: So for me the trick has been to structure my life so that most of my time is spent in the writing room. Most of a person’s understanding of truth is happening there. This success—it’s just like you are walking down the street and at some points you smell a great meal cooking and sometimes you’ll smell a dumpster. But you took that path and you accept the smells that are coming at you and enjoy them. Or not. But you didn’t necessarily cause them.

RB: As a reader, I occasionally come across stuff that I don’t think I know what I am reading—some Faulkner is like that. I like it, but I couldn’t clearly explain what I read the last 20 pages. What is the responsibility of the writer there? And I am not a lazy reader—I don’t expect the author to make things easy.

GS: It depends on the writer. Some writers seem to live for that, it’s their method and it works, and other people—I mean even within one writer’s career you might feel like, “I love these nine books of his, but that tenth one was a little too difficult.” Or too easy. That is, I don’t think the writer has to—or even can—decide “how difficult to be.” You just do what feels urgent at the time.

RB: And maybe it’s not the text, but that you might be having a dumb day, or a headache, or some worrisome distraction.

GS: As you write book one, you write it from a certain place, and as you do that you learn certain things that then inflect you differently on book two and three and so on. So my experience has been that it all has had very little to do with intentionality. It’s more instinctual. It’s funny, when a book comes out people will say things, positive or negative, assuming that you planned it, that you meant it, or thought it out in advance or whatever. They credit the writer with some combination of intentionality and design and certainty. I feel like when you are writing it’s much more from the seat of the pants. You’re just trying to get it to cohere, and almost as soon as you conceive of the idea you realize that it’s got this defect, or defects, so you are trying to find a counter-balance. It’s like plate-spinning. And at the end, kind of in the spirit of coming out of a fight, you go, “Ha, wow, that’s done.” But it’s not like you very confidently say, “Hooray, I produced this wonderful work of art, of which I am entirely sure.” It’s more like, “Wow, shit, that was confusing.” But it’s as good as you can get it and it goes out into the world and people say things that imply that artist is in control and is making a statement. I kind of laugh because it doesn’t feel like that at all.

RB: So you listen to what people are saying?

GS: Sure. Yeah.

RB: There is no real connection.

GS: There’s not, except sometimes—again pro or con—somebody will say something and it sticks to your ribs and it helps you. There was a review a couple of books ago—somebody said “Saunders writes better from love than from anger.” At first, I was like “What are you talking about?”

RB: You got angry. (laughs)

GS: Yeah, I got angry. But when I read that, something really resonated with me. I’ve kept that in mind ever since, and it’s been helpful. So when someone writes a review, my attitude is: OK, here it comes. It washes over you and then something will stick and the only reason you want it to stick, is to help the next thing to be better. If someone says something nice and it emboldens you, good. If someone says something harsh and that pulls you out of a ditch, that’s good too.

RB: What if it puts you in a ditch?

GS: That happens. But you can come out of a ditch. And maybe it will turn out to have been a good thing.

RB: What I am hearing from you is that as you write more books you learn more about writing, but that emotionally the task of writing has the same effect it did when you started. You are not more confident today than when you began?

GS: No, I hope not. The only way I am more confident now is that I feel if I persist in a given story it will usually come through for me. Eventually. I don’t have the urge to abandon things. That state of under-confidence, for me, is really important. It means that you don’t coast. You work every piece as hard as you can, so at the end if somebody says that you’re repeating yourself, you go, ”Actually, I am not. It may seem that way to you? But I don’t think I am.” Or likewise if someone says, “…this is the most innovative thing. It’s unlike anything you’ve done before.” You can go, “Actually it’s not. But it’s fine if you think that.” All of that working time puts you into a close relationship with your own work—you understand it pretty well, from the inside, the good parts and the defects. You are working on your relationship to truth every day in your writing room and so you understand what you have done, for better or worse. There are pieces of mine where, halfway in, I knew it had a fatal flaw. Is that the end? No, it’s the beginning. That’s called craft. So then you try to make the fatal flaw work for you in some way. So at the end if someone says it has a fatal flaw, you’re like, “Uh yeaaah. I know that, that’s what I was trying to fix all this time.” It’s almost like when someone says, about another person’s personality, “Oh, he’s hardnosed.” Or, ”He’s wimpy.” That person knows that, probably. Their trajectory through life has been to try to accommodate that character flaw.

RB: Also knowing that one aspect doesn’t usually define a person—people are more complex.

GS: That’s right. And they can bring the other characteristics to bear on that one. So for me the only weird thing about the promotional part of a book is that what has been private becomes public and there’s a certain feeling that this person or that person thinks you were more in control than you actually were. They think that, by putting out a book, you are making certain aesthetic claims. Or that you are claiming something with the book that you probably weren’t. About all I would claim about any book of mine is that I did the best I could given the time, conditions, and circumstances under which I wrote it. To be pushing an aesthetic agenda or claiming total originality—I think you would have to be nuts. The process is too high-wire and scary.

RB: What happens when you teach?

GS: This semester I taught an editing class, where I just brought in some of my pieces that had been edited, and some written by friends. The purpose of that part of the class was to show that to be a writer is to be in a state of uncertainty. Not complete uncertainty, but recurring uncertainty. Everyday: “I’m not quite sure. I’m not quite sure.” And that’s ok, that’s actually part of it. And to reassure the students that their teachers absolutely are unsure. It doesn’t matter how long you have been writing, you have that feeling of vulnerability. The edits come back, you cringe, and then you embrace them, or engage with them. So I think that’s biggest thing we can teach—they are going to have their own methodology and that feeling of being insecure, feeling like you don’t know what you are doing—that’s part and parcel of the job itself. It’s not failure. It might be easier to have some schtick and dogmatize—to pretend to have some unwavering relation to some constant Truth about writing—but that’s false. That’s the road to artistic death. So one of the best things we can teach our students is that when they are working and feel like, “God, this is so hard!”—that this is precisely the right attitude.

RB: You teach at a well-regarded university with a reputedly fine writing program. Your students come with aspirations to succeed in what some people suggest is a dying enterprise. Do you feel like you need to buoy their spirits?

GS: Their spirits are pretty buoyed. This year we received 566 applications for six spots. So you pick those six people and they are buoyed. They love it and they have already decided that this is the thing they are doing. We do three fully funded years—there is no tuition and there is a stipend for everybody. It’s pretty generous. Arthur Flowers, one of my colleagues, is bringing back 14 former students in a few weeks. They are all published and all are doing pretty well. So it’s actually not that hopeless. One thing we emphasize is that it’s not a career—it’s a vocation. So if you are really going to do this thing, don’t get confused and connect it with money, status, or a job even. For three years treat it like a monastic enterprise where you are going to go as deep as you can in your own art. It might work out. It might not. That’s not a linear thing. But at least give yourself the gift of three years of really trying. So that’s a pretty pure—

RB: So they are not coming out of the program carrying crushing debt.

GS: Exactly right. That keeps it a very pure thing. They come in, they give us three years, we give them a stipend. That’s fair enough. If somebody were leaving with $80 k in debt you’d feel guilty. It would put a weird spin on the teaching. So this is a pretty generous thing in both directions.

RB: You’ve there how long?

George Saunders by Robert Birnbaum (circa 2006)

GS: Since ‘96, ‘97.

RB: So that’s about 100 grads. How many have you kept in touch with?

GS: A lot.

RB: How many, relatively speaking, are satisfied with what they’ve done?

GS: Most. They are a pretty high-achieving, happy—I would imagine about the same as the general population. I think so, yeah. The people we meet tend to be real high-functioning and pretty pragmatic. Not too much drama, really. What I really like is that you can take the students seriously as people. You are not trying to avoid them. They are there for three years and you’re friends and so it’s a kind of teaching that doesn’t feel costly.

RB: What is the vetting/admissions process like to get six out of over 500?

GS: We just read the work. Until a few years ago we would each read every application. But the last few years, maybe because of the financial crunch, our applications doubled. So now we are dividing them into fours.

RB: The financial crunch doubled the applications.

GS: Yeah. That was the year it happened. I got the sense it was people who said, “Well, I am not working anyway so I might as well try this thing.” So that’s hard. This year my share of it was 180—I read 180. Honestly, I would have loved to have worked with the top 30 that I picked. But I am only contributing two out of that. There are just a lot of talented people. In the end, what you have to say is, this isn’t about who is the best writer. It’s about trying to find six people who we would be excited to work with. Are we willing to dedicate three years of our lives to them? And vice versa.

RB: You can tell that from reading their work?

GS: I think so. It’s just a feeling of enthusiasm that I get while reading certain of the applications. Almost a feeling like: “Wow, am I ever happy to know this person, through their work.” Some people you are reading and you say, “Damn that’s good. But I don’t know if I’d want to read 100 pages of it.” Not that I wouldn’t want to read it but—I can tick off the six that we accepted by naming the delightful things in each of their stories, things that got me laughing or moved me. In those final six, the person comes through, the human being on the other end. And it’s very exciting.

RB: Is there an introductory bio statement?

GS: They write a personal statement. Which we often—I often don’t read them. If they write a great personal statement and the story isn’t up to snuff, the personal statement isn’t getting them in. Or if the personal statement is dumb and the story rocks, we’re going to let that person in. Sometimes we’ll go back and look at the personal statements just to try to get a little extra something. To try to understand a certain frequency in the work or something. This year, the ones we picked, their stories were good and seemed to have a lot of heart and a command of technical means. So you see it and you go, “Well, it might not be perfect, but I know I could work with this person. I could say this, this, and this, and the story would already be a lot better.”

RB: When you say that you are in your writing room and there is some kind of truth that you are looking for—something true or Truth?

GS: I don’t know. Either one. What I mean is, when you are working on a story and you are deep into it, there is some kind of work that you are doing that is really low bullshit. Uh, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s low concept. You are not looking at the outside world. Or worrying about the eventual reception of the piece. You are not indulging in some artistic theory. You have a character in a room—what language can you use to make that person come more alive? For me, there’s something about that, that’s primary. If I can get three or four hours a day of that, everything gets clarified. I don’t mean true, as in big truth. Just relative truth within the bounds of a story. You have the character say or do a certain thing and you think, for example, “That seems weird. That line’s not great. It seems like my agenda for him is exerting itself. He might want to say or do something different. Something that results in a better, more lively sentence.” And you take another shot at it. And suddenly the character blurts something out that you hadn’t expected. I think what I would say is, you’re being in a certain honest, receptive relation to the piece you are writing—you’re trying to be a pure conduit for whatever the story is telling you. And there is something about being that pure conduit that’s really grounding. Stuart Dybek says the story is always talking to you, and your job is to listen. And there is something about that state that I am kind of addicted to—where you are not thinking about theme or content or politics or what this story will do to you or for your career. You are really just trying to listen to the energy coming off of the story.

RB: Dybek is teaching at Northwestern now.

GS: Dybek changed my writing life before I ever met him. I read that story “Hot Ice” when I was really young and kind of lost. I wasn’t reading anything contemporary. And I read that piece and it blew the top of my head off. I had never seen my world represented in fiction before. And I thought, “Ah, OK, that’s what it would feel like to have a contemporary vignette.”

RB: You’re both from the South Side of Chicago.

GS: My dad went to the same high school as Dybek, but then we moved out to the south suburbs. He was more of a city guy and my dad was more of a city guy. All that street slang and descriptions of the shop windows were completely familiar.

RB: For a while you were doing some glossy-magazine journalism.

GS: Yeah.

RB: Are you still doing that?

GS: No.

RB: Because?

GS: Ah, well there was a time about four years ago when I just had a hunch if I stopped doing all this other kind of writing my fiction would improve. So I stopped. I had been writing some humor, some screenplays, some travel pieces. All that was to get—sometimes you gotta kick the nest a little. So I did that to get reinvigorated for fiction. And then I stopped all of it. And this book came out of that period. I just wasn’t doing anything else. The metaphor that came to mind was, if you had five streams that were medium deep, when you stopped four of them the one got deeper. For the immediate future I am going to try to stick with that: fiction only. Fiction is really where my heart is. I am somebody, probably like a lot of writers—I like attention. That’s probably why I got into this, at least partly. And I noticed that if I say, to myself, “Ok, you can have attention but only for this one thing—now go write a short story,” the work gets a lot deeper.

RB: I took it as a sign of your increasing popularity—magazine editors like the idea of using well-known fiction authors.

GS: The way it happened was Jim Nelson and Andy Ward at GQ put their heads together and hired me to do that Dubai piece. And that was kind of a flyer. I had never written a travel piece before.

RB: And then you did a piece from Afghanistan?

GS: Nepal. About a boy who was meditating without food or water for six months. I drove the Mexican border and I went to live in a homeless camp for a week in Fresno, kind of incognito. And then I went with [Bill] Clinton to Africa. So it was a great kind of midlife rejuvenation. You know: I know what I think, but what does the world think? So that was good. I would do that periodically, but it takes me a long time to write a book of fiction and I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to do yet. So I am trying to keep the discipline of just doing fiction.

RB: Is it an adjustment, going from the sedentary professorial life to the jetting around?

GS: Yeah. And that’s why I like it.

RB: It’s harder to travel these days?

GS: Yeah and—hell, those are hard trips. The beginning is a 30-hour flight and also…every one of those pieces, not by design, really got me out of my comfort zone. It’s the nature of that kind of writing. You have some preconceptions about the piece. And then the actual experience overturns those almost immediately. That one in Fresno—you fly out there. You are a professor; a nice guy, kind of coddled and soft, and then you go put up a tent in this crack house, basically. Things get really uncomfortable, really fast. Deeply anxiety-producing. So it’s very uncomfortable at the time, but I think that’s good. One of the dangers of being at all successful is that you are always surrounded by this bubble of approval. Your students like you. You go on tour, you go to bookstores. They like you. And just as a middle-aged person, you know, you’re a known and respectable quantity. People in stores see you and go: “Oh, he’s an old dude, he has a credit card, no problem.” So to go into a place where you are being perceived differently than you are used to being perceived is terrific.

RB: How were you perceived?

GS: In the homeless camp? As just some old disreputable dude who had presumably fallen on hard times, I guess.

RB: Did you wear dirty, disheveled clothing?

GS: I just wore the same clothes for a week. Jeans and a shirt and a fleece jacket. That all got grosser and grosser. Actually, the people there were dressed like we all dress, kind of reasonably, but dirtier, I guess. It’s a hard place to live. What you find out—and this was maybe one of the saddest parts—was that they are under so much stress that they are not really looking at you. They are just reduced to looking at you, and at everything, in order to perceive threat, and if they don’t perceive threat you’re sort of invisible, or neutral. And also they’re looking a little to see if you can be victimized. I was right in the middle there—I wasn’t a threat and I wasn’t going to be victimized. So I think after a few days even people who I had told I was a writer, those people stopped seeing me. That was incredible—to blend. I heard some outrageous things. And saw some outrageous things. Some things that I don’t think I would have heard or seen if I was just dropping in. But to have a tent there and be there 5 or 6 days…

RB: Do you feel any conflict about the presence of a story about a homeless camp in a glossy consumer magazine like GQ?

GS: Sure. Maybe. But on the other hand, where else is it going to go? Or where better for it to go? They gave me 12,000 words and four months to write it, sent a great photographer, gave it a nice pride of place in a huge magazine. I am not sure about this but it’s a good question—because I have been doing some TV lately and it’s kind of the same thing: To what extent are you willing to consent to the inevitable constraints of any media that is going to reach a big audience? My take on it is there is nothing de facto wrong with any glossy magazine or a big TV thing. But as the content provider you have to keep yourself honest and make sure you do the best job you can, within whatever format you are working in. Stay honest, say whatever needs to be said. To me, it’s fantastic that there could be a piece about a homeless camp in GQ, because it gets out to millions of people. And it was a real leap of faith on the editor’s part to let me do it.

RB: I recall seeing a piece (“Life on the Border” by Jim Harrison) about the Arizona-Mexico border in Men’s Journal, one of those laddie magazines dedicated to six-pack abs and avoiding erectile dysfunction. It was a magnificent survey of the history of the border including the Gadsden Purchase, which most people don’t know anything about.

GS: What I find, mostly—as an example, in a big magazine like GQ, Jim Nelson and Andy Ward (when he was still there) were such fighters for literature. They were fighting to get 12,000 words on something like this homeless piece. So I think that is kind of heroic. And there was never anything but encouragement to go deeper, be more fierce, more literary. So those of us who talk about media—I feel like it’s important to figure out how these things actually work. From the inside. And you see that these entities have people really fighting for literature. So I feel like it’s OK to help, you know? To try writing a really good entertaining piece that is also a little dark and a little edgy. They were always supportive of that. It’s easy to see these places as just, you know, “big entities.” But the more interesting way is to look at the big thing and see that it’s actually a number of smaller entities working together in a certain way. People within the magazine or TV station or whatever agreeing to do this more populist thing if it makes it possible to do this more literary thing, and so on. If there is a great interview or short story in Playboy, it’s a great interview or short story. The magazine itself—or the TV show, or whatever—is a delivery system, and delivery systems can work in complicated and multivalent ways.

RB: GQ doesn’t strike me as the go-to venue for hard-hitting journalism.

GS: I disagree. If you look at the last nine years there’s always a big story—Richard Powers has been in in there, John Sullivan, Mike Paterniti. So I don’t know.

RB: GQ has William Giraldi doing offbeat sports stories.

GS: It’s the same conundrum everyone is in—and it’s a choice. If you want to reach a million people, then you write for venues that reach a lot of people. On the other hand, if you just care about a few hundred people then you can choose to do that. I have a kind of optimism about the uses of literature. You think of Dickens, you think of Tolstoy. Those guys were not shy about wanting to reach people. If it starts to become a niche thing sort of like MFA land, so that only those of us who get the code can read it, then I find that not so interesting. I find it a little sad. Most people get into writing for bigger-hearted reasons than that, I think. They don’t want to be marginalized. They don’t want to be part of a niche enterprise. They want to reach a lot of people and be great artists and they also want to give people pleasure—so I think it’s all right.

RB: What is life like living in a smalltown America—are there ghettos?

GS: Yeah sure. I don’t know if they are called ghettos anymore. There are rough neighborhoods.

RB: Crack houses?

GS: Yeah, sure. I guess so. I don’t know where they are. (laughs)

RB: What is Syracuse lacking?

GS: I think it has pretty much everything. I really like it—it’s not a big city and it’s not a small town. One thing I have loved about living there is that if the well gets a little dry, you can take a walk or drive around town. It seems about the right size. You can get in anywhere and meet anybody. We moved recently, out to the Catskills, so we don’t live in Syracuse anymore. But same deal, small town. At this point I don’t need a whole lot. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of stuff, so if I can get in a reasonably good mood in the morning that’s all I need to do.

RB: You said you have a lot to get done. Is that an abstraction or—

GS: No, it’s an abstraction. There is a certain tone I would like to hit, a tone that would have to do with detail and humor and tenderness but also texture. It’s not a list of books to finish and it’s not a page count. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I would just like to feel, before I die, that I had got on paper the way I actually feel about life. That would be nice.

RB: How close are you to that goal?

GS: Not that close. Actually, not at all close. I have to keep working. There are little hints sometimes. I can sort of hear or feel what it would be like. It’s going to take some time. But what else are you going to do?

RB: I had this great question that I now can’t remember, does that happen to you?

George Saunders by Robert Birnbaum

GS: Yeah, but it always comes back. If it really wants to be there.

RB: You think you will know when you get it right?

GS: I don’t think you ever—

RB: What a conundrum.

GS: It’s a good one. A pleasant loop: I aspire, I try, I fail, I fail. I die.

RB: An upward spiral?

GS: I think so. I hope so. I suppose it’s like eating. You know that you are going to eat until the end of your life. So you might as well enjoy it—although not too much. And you know the moment that your heart stops, you will either have just eaten or be just about to eat. You’re never going to get to the place where you go, “Aha, at last, I have eaten perfectly, and never have to do it again!” Same way with art—what would be great is if I could stay as interested in it forever as I am right now. That would be really deep. Maybe I won’t.

RB: I am fascinated by your fiction—I rarely can get what your starting point is. You bend grammar and punctuation and use words at some kind of oblique angle. I was looking at your story in Fakes, that anthology of fiction that Davis Shields edited. You seem to be able to turn anything into a story.

GS: I think so. You can take any little mode of communication and exaggerate it and overstuff it and make it yield meaning. Like earlier when we were looking at that stock market report on the TV—you could do a great comic film on that. You put in twice as many things on the screen. Make it itself, but more so. Exploit the innate comic potential of the form. For me, it’s giving yourself an assignment and then exploiting the inherent potential of the constraint. When you say, “Write a story in the form of a memo,” that gets me excited. If you say, “Hey write a story about the universe, no rules,” I go, “Oh my god.”

RB: That’s the story about the manager exhorting his employees to have positive attitudes.

GS: Maybe that’s heart of short fiction, you start with some constraint—like a hobble. You are not writing the story of the whole universe. That, to me, is when the art comes in. You have a hobble on and you’re told to dance. “But I have a hobble on.” “Dance!” So then you are dancing with the hobble and that’s where you see what you are really made of. If somebody would lay down 10 constraints for me—I would love to write that book.

RB: “Escape from Spiderhead” was the most ethereal story I have read by you.

GS: What writing is—if you look over a career, I think writing is a way of self-wriggling out of boredom. You find new things to do because you’ve played out a certain terrain already and can’t stay there. For example—let’s say somebody said to us, “You are going to have this conversation for three years. You can’t move from this table for three years.”

RB: (laughs)

GS: At first, we talk like we are talking now. And then we burn through that first level. Then for the next week you tell me all your childhood stories—basically what you are doing in that situation is veering away from boredom. The only way to go is deep. Or, at least—different. You are veering away from what’s been done before. Same thing with writing. You write 10 stories, 20 stories, 30 stories and you become familiar with your own habits and your own proclivities. And then you have to squirm away so you don’t do the same thing again. Which leads you to some new ground. But at the same time the room that is your talent, is, in my case, pretty small. So with that story “Spiderhead,” I had written a lot of stories in a diction than was maybe 20% less articulate than I actually am. A little halting and minimalist. On purpose, for comic effect, but then I started feeling, “Oh god, I just want to write smart. I want to write something that’s at the top of my game.” And somehow to just write a story like that, I can’t quite do it. But in that one, where I started with the low diction and made up that drug to go into higher diction, I felt like I found a little corner of my room that I hadn’t been in before. It was sort of a joke I was having with myself. How can I excuse extreme voiceiness? Well, more drugs.

Our drugs are so clumsy now that we can see it’s generally not a good idea to be doing drugs all the time—we can see that the transformation drugs occasion in a person is fleeting and fake and costly. But in that story I thought: what if the drugs were incredibly good? That is, what if they made these alternative states that were really wonderful? If you could imagine yourself on the day in your life when you were at your most precise and articulate, now let’s take that and ramp it up 20%. And if you wanted to, you could take a pill and have that feeling every day of your life. There are no side effects. That’s just you now: that more precise and articulate person. Would you take that deal or not? My natural impulse is to say no, but I bet once you were in that state you might feel differently. Because who would choose to be dumber and less articulate? Or we could ask, OK, I will give you a drug that will make you more loving and kind and expansive as you’ve ever been. You will be a great force for good. People will come away positively changed from every interaction with you. What do you say to that? I don’t think there will ever be that drug and if there, it will have most likely have side effects…but what if?

RB: Side effects—every drug seems to have the same possible side effects—diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness ad naseaum. What are you reading these days?

GS: I’m reading Gogol. Rereading all of Gogol. He’s my hero, Gogol, for some reason. I love him but I don’ t understand him yet.

RB: This is a current enthusiasm?

GS: Current, yeah, for the last 10 years. He is somebody I can always come back to. I think it’s because—he’s kind of a role model for me. I didn’t know this about him, but there is a great introduction to, I think it might be Dead Souls—there’s a couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and they did a great translation of Dead Souls—

RB: How do you know? (laughs)

GS: Well, it’s a great book, a great read. In the introduction they were talking about how Gogol had come from the provinces. He was a contemporary of Pushkin’s. There was a part in [the intro] that said, “Gogol sensed he couldn’t do what Pushkin did.” Pushkin was, you know, beautifully educated, his work was very high literary. And Gogol was a kid from the back woods. But then there is a great description of what he did with bureaucratese and how he understood that if could take the diction of the provinces and use it to comic effect, that could be expansive. So I have been thinking about that a lot—I am naturally inarticulate but I’ve found that I can control it, somewhat, and make it funny. I love the idea of a great American book that is all in crummy English. Or defective degraded English. I know you don’t pick it all up in the English because apparently the Russians have frequencies that we don’t hear. With Russian, they do a lot of sound things that are just not translatable.

RB: Do you know of a writer named Charlie Yu?

GS: I’ve met him. I know his work. He is really good.

RB: In his reviews it’s suggested that he comes out of your camp of whatever people are labeling your fiction. Speculative fiction?

GS: I don’t know. Some of them are. This sounds like such a ‘70s songwriter thing to say but to me, the labeling is dangerous from the writer’s point of view. Because as soon as you say, “Oh I’m a guy who does speculative fiction,” then you start ruling things out. As they come to you, you go, “Oh no, that wouldn’t be speculative fiction, so I can’t do it.” And that would be terrible artistically. Some great off-ramp presents itself and you refuse to get off your highway because of some ideological loyalty? Big trouble. It’s better to keep the box open and see what you do and not worry about it. Take the most interesting path, always. The way I find myself thinking about writing now is, if you have been living in the world awhile, the truth starts to sneak up on you. Which is: our time here is not very long. And even though every day seems as if your time is long, it’s not. We are in a cycle of slow decay. And all these blessings that we have are slowly fading.

RB: (laughs)

GS: I am always looking for some acknowledgement of that in writing. It can come in genre. It can come in whatever. But something that says, “OK, let’s face one thing: we are not here very long. And everything we do has to be seen through that lens.” Then it’s interesting, and it doesn’t matter if it’s realism or whatever.

RB: Something most people are ready to do. Well, thanks very much. See you again, in a few years.

GS It’s always a pleasure. Is this our third, fourth, fifth?

George Saunders with Rosie by Robert Birnbaum

*In medieval Venice, Jews were required to wear red hats, or other distinguishing clothing, such as a yellow circle or scarfwhen outside of the Geto or trading area.

Currently reading The Son by Phillip Meyer (Ecco)