Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (8 page)

And an amused … a kind of amused attempt to separate what’s good, what of the fuss has to do with the book, and what of the fuss has to do with the sort of enormous engine, um,
started
by Little, Brown. But now clearly seems to be humming in and of itself. Y’know, when somebody asked somebody in New York, had they read Martin Amis’s
The Information
, the person answered, “Well, not personally.” Right? That—you know.

That’s actually an old joke. My mom heard it about students at Stanford in the
’
80s. “Have you read Madame Bovary?” “Well, not personally.” What does it mean to you?

This machine that has you out here, asking about my reaction to a phenomenon that consists largely of your being out here. Which of course won’t get said in the essay. But, I mean, it’s all very strange.

I love this song. “Magic Bus.” The Who
.

This is one of the few songs of theirs I like. I never liked the Who very much.

Literary heavyweights: You and them at Yaddo …

Yeah, and me feelin’ jealous of them. And feeling like I wanted to be regarded the way they were regarded. And uh … what was our point?

And now you’re them?

Yeah. It’s weird, man. I can’t help you out. It doesn’t (“dudn’t”) feel like anything. It makes me glad I’m not twenty-five anymore. I feel a certain irony in—when I was twenty-five, I think I would’ve given a couple of digits off my non-use hand for this. And now: it’s nice, it’s nice. But I’ll tell you, man, I couldn’t’ve finished the book if I’d wanted this. You know what I mean? I really got into it. I don’t think I’m the most talented person on the planet, but I work
really
hard, you know? And part of what’s really hard is I work really hard at getting better at stuff, you know? I mean like …

You became a better stylist?

I think I work harder now. I think—I don’t know what you were like. I think when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I pretty much thought every sentence that came off my pen was great. And couldn’t
stand
the idea that it wasn’t. Because then you’ve disintegrated—you know, you’re either great or you’re terrible. And now I just, I think I’m just—yeah, I know this is gonna sound drippy and PC. I’m just,
I’m really into the
work
now. I mean it’s really—and I feel good about this. Because, you know, we wanna be doing this for forty more years, you know? And so I’ve gotta find some way to enjoy this that doesn’t involve getting
eaten
by it, so that I’m gonna be able to go do something else. Because bein’ thirty-four, sitting alone in a room with a piece of paper is what’s real to me. This (points at table, tape, me) is
nice
, but this is not real. Y’know what I mean?

[Long silence]

Let’s be aware; we have to get up at about five. I mean I’ll talk to you all you want—I just, if I get four hours of sleep tonight, I’m gonna be in real bad shape tomorrow. I learned that the hard way.

You’ve talked about both strands: obviously, the first strand, where you know it was really good, won out, or you wouldn’t have finished the book, right?

No. The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that’s all about how other people react. You know?

But there’s a certain halfway point where you bottom out on that stuff, and then you become like a stranger brought in by the studio to wrap things up? I’ve always seen it as, you start a project as David Lean, or Francis Coppola, but at a certain point you get yanked and you end up as the Don Bruckheimer or the Sydney Pollack they bring in to finish the picture
.

Uhh … Boy, I don’t know, you realize—

You become the hired gun …

I’ve worked on maybe four or five things—some short, some long—that became alive to me halfway through. And this came alive to me halfway through. And I would still hear the, “This is the best
thing ever written,” and “This is the
worst
thing ever written.” But it’s sort of like, you know how in movies there will be a conversation, and then that conversation gets quieter, and a different conversation fades in … I don’t know, there’s some technical word for it. Just, the volume gets turned down. Now there’s been other stuff where the volume hasn’t been turned down, and I
have
finished it. Just, I was a hack: “God damn it, I’m going to finish this thing.”

This
thing, I got real interested in it. And I got real invested in it. And it’s one reason why the big part of me that’s pleased about all this fuss—other than, Perhaps I’ll get
laid
in like
Akron
or something—is that I’m proud of this. In a way that for instance I’m
not
proud of
Broom of the System
. Which I think shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily, sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that was really a not-very-interesting way … really a way for me to avoid doing hard work.

And
this
I just, I didn’t fuck off on this, you know? I mean, this is absolutely the best I could do between like 1992 and 1995. And I also think though that if everybody’d hated it, I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I don’t think I’d be devastated, either. It’s—and that’s not about being a hack, that’s about that it got, it became
alive
for me.

Maybe “hired gun” was too cynical
.

It doesn’t sound cynical to me, but the ways that I would disagree with you I’m worried would sound occult. For me it has much more to do with, I feel like people are talking to me. I feel like this thing, this is a living thing. With whom, with which I have a relationship that needs to be tended. That I feel, not—that I feel un-lonely working on it. Which (mouth full) to be honest, I mean, there’ve been a few things that I’ve felt that way about, that ended up I don’t think being all that good. Or people didn’t like ’em all that much. But, um … I just think that it
hurts
. I think I have a really low pain threshold. I think the I’ll-show-people, or, People-are-really-gonna-like-this—thinking
that way has hurt me
so
bad. That, um, that when I’m thinkin’ that way, I’m not writing.

That that’s this thinking in me that’s gotta reach this kind of fever pitch, and then
break
. And in order for me to even start—not to get in the groove, but to get started—I’ve gotta find some way to turn the volume of that way down. And I think I’m more afraid—it sounds to me like you have a possibly cynical, possibly just very mature acceptance of the inevitability of that, that way of thinking. Whereas my experience has been, I think in certain ways I’m just emotionally kinda delicate, and it’s just
devastating
to me to think that way. And I’m willing to do enormous work—and enormous emotional and psychological gymnastics—to avoid thinking that way.

Have you since read the seventeen-page letter about Broom?

Oh sure. It talks about how the entire book is a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and presence versus absence. I mean, Gerry [Gerry Howard,
Broom’s
editor] didn’t want the book to end there. We have a cast of characters who are afraid their names don’t denote, word and referent are united in absence, which means Derrida … you know what? It’s a brilliant little theoretical document, unfortunately it resulted in a shitty and dissatisfying ending, right?

And in fact it was a very cynical argument, because there was a part of me—this was a year and a half after I wrote it, and I knew that that ending, there was good stuff about it, but it was way too clever. It was all about the
head
, you know? And Gerry kept saying to me, “Kid, you’ve got no idea.” Like, “We wouldn’t even be
having
this conversation if you hadn’t created this woman named Lenore who seems halfway appealing and alive.” And I couldn’t hear. I just couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear it. I was in … Dave Land.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was. And so, as a result, for the rest of my life, I will walk around … You know, I will see that
book occasionally at signings. And I will realize I was arrogant, and missed a chance to make that book better. And hopefully I won’t do it again. It’s why I will not run lit-crit on my own stuff. And don’t even want to talk about it.

My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.

Because ideas are primary? And then the writing goes bad?

I’m not sure if it’s poorly written: It requires an amount of work on the part of the reader that’s grotesquely disproportionate to its payoff. And it seems—when I am a reader of that kind of stuff, and I’m talking like heavy-duty experimental stuff, some of which I have to read just because I do various stuff with experimental press. I feel like I am as a reader like a small child, and adults are having a conversation over my head; that this is really a book being written for other writers, theorists, and critics. And that any of that kind of stomach magic of, “God
damn
, it’s fun to read. I’d rather read right now than
eat,”
has been totally lost.

So this was really one of the reasons I’m thrilled about the fuss about the book. Is: in this I wanted to do something that is real experimental and very strange, but it’s also
fun
. And that was also of course really scary. Because I thought maybe that couldn’t be done—or that it would come off just as a hellacious flop. But I’m sort of proud of it, because I think it was kind of a right-headed and brave thing to do. And I think, I think there’s a reason why a lot of avant-garde stuff gets neglected: I think that a lot of it deserves to be. Same with a lot of poetry. That’s written for other people that write poetry, and not for people that read. I don’t know. That’s kind of a whole rant.

I agree. Lorrie Moore works for readers, not just writers. Martin Amis …

But there’s also, there’s ways that experimental and avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings, in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.

I disagree. I’m a realism fan. You agree?

It imposes an order and sense and ease of interpretation on experience that’s never there in real life. I’m talking about the stuff, you know, what’s hard or looks structurally strange—or formally weird—I mean some of that stuff can be very cool.

But Tolstoy’s books come closer to the way life feels than anybody, and those books couldn’t be more conventional
.

Yeah, but life now is completely different than the way it was then. Does your life
approach
anything like a linear narrative? I’m talking about the way it feels, how our nervous system feels.

[Long pause]

You mean like TV life and computer life?

Some of it has to do with TV and fiction. You watch many videos? MTV videos? Lot of flash cuts in ’em. A lot of shit that looks incongruous but ends up having kind of a dream association with each other. I don’t know about you, but that’s sort of—I mean, Jesus. Um, you flew here. You drove down. Probably while you’re driving down you’re also doing work on another piece. You’re lugging your computer. You come, you talk to me. You and I have our little conversation. Then I need to go do my class and am thinking about that, then you’re thinking about the phone. Then you and I go to the class. God knows what you’re doing in the class. Now we’re here. Now you’re in a good mood ’cause you’ve mailed this thing off, that because of your relationship with these various other webs and commitments—

I mean, it’s more as if—Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. In a way that—maybe I’m very naïve—I imagine Leo getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat with
the serfs whom he’s freed [making clear he knows something about the texture and subject], you know. Sitting down in his
silent
room, overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill, and … in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.

And I don’t know about you. I just—stuff that’s like that, I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel
true
at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out, you know?

And yet you made a linear narrative, easily, out of both our days, just now. Off the top of your head. I think our brain is structured to make linear narratives, to condense and focus and separate what’s important
.

You, if this is an argument, you will win. This is an argument you will win. [Strange: competition.] I am attempting to describe for you what I mean in response to your, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

What always strikes me is the opposite: the lack of
discontinuity,
not the lack of continuity
.

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn’t really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I’m not defending it, I’m saying that stuff—this is gonna get very abstract—but there’s a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There’s maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of
capturing
, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell “Another sensibility like mine
exists.”
Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely. [“Lonely” again; interesting.]

There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake. That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction—sort of, like, if you look at the history of painting after the development of photography—that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to continue to do that magical stuff. As the texture, as the
cognitive
texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.