A Conversation with William Veeder
Jenny Gavacs:
Tell me about the narrative structure of the novel, and why you chose to do it in a sort of meta way.
William Veeder:
The structure of the novel is designed to be an experience itself. Since I believe as a critic that one gets to content through form, so much of the content of this book is experiential: You either get it or you don't, there's nothing that tells you what things mean. I've tried to create formal experiences rather than prepositional statements. So for example, one of the things that the book is about is the tension between two ways of imagining a human life. One is developmental, the other is marked by repetition compulsion. In other words, is a human life like an arrow, shot through the air where we mature and grow wise? Or is it like a circle, where we are just going around and around?
The novel is composed of six chapters, and each chapter begins at the beginning of the heroine's life and goes to the end of her life, suggesting the developmental arc of the arrow. But it's also a circular movement, since each chapter begins back at the beginning of her life; you're circling around. At the end of each chapter, at the very end, it circles back to the beginning of her life. So the chapters are both linear and circular, and the movement between the chapters is both linear and circular. So the point is not to decide, "Is one model right and the other one wrong?" but rather to give you the experience of the conflict between two different ways of imagining experience. The same thing happens at the level of the page. The book is a collection of thousands of fragments, and the fragments are laid out on the page horizontally in three different positions. At the left margin is the overview that Emma Frances Dawson writes between 1900 and 1920. Tab in one, and you are to the diary entries that she's written between 1853 and 1923 and has pasted on the ms pages. Tab in a second tab and you go to the things that she pasted into the diary entry way back when: Press cuttings, obits, notes from Emily Dickinson, etc. So by constantly moving from one temporal field to another, and back and forth, I hope the reader experiences the past and the future crashing together in the present. There's no real past because the past keeps surging up in the present; there is no past because the past and the future are always immediately in the picture. So the attempt here is to give the experience of what time feels like, just as the overall structure is an attempt to give an experience of what it is like to be a human being.
Now the second thing that's complicated about the page is that there's a vertical movement, and not just because you're reading down the page. The heroine's initials are E.D. and she produces most of each page. At the foot of the page there's a lowercase "e.d." and that's the figure who's editing all of this. He is as Apollonian as she is Dionysian, that is he's the typical male and she's the typical female, so he tries to provide an order, a linearity, causation. He reads in terms of straight lines; she's more elliptical and emotional and volatile. What I think is particularly tempting to do in terms of gender here is to establish that she's on top, which reverses our cultural priorities—she clearly dominates over him. The same thing is also true in the third formal element, that is the genre. The book begins as a biography of Ambrose Bierce, but a quarter of the way through Emma Frances seizes control of it herself, and she makes it her property, so once again the feminine is taking control. In this case, of her own destiny, but also woman's paradigmatic need to take control of her own life. Indeed down through history women become the repositories of memory. You see in the beginning of Rip Van Winkle that Dietrick Knickerbocker got the story from the old gossips, so they remember. Emma Frances is moving from the passive role of remembering the exploits of great men who killed themselves, into an insistence that her life is interesting, too. There isn't anything in the book that says any of this, but I'm attempting to give the reader the experience of what its like to live in the world.
G:
Why Ambrose Bierce? Why did you pick Emma? Why did you pick that particular subject?
V:
It's either funny or embarrassing or both. I cannot remember where I heard the following story, and I've never been able to find it again: I'd heard that one of Ambrose Bierce's innumerable girlfriends, when he vanished into Mexico in 1913, nailed herself up in her house and starved to death. This seemed to me like a story worth telling in ten different ways. It turns out it isn't true, I can't find out where the source of the untrue story is, but it's not true. The story captivated me howsoever, and I set out to work on both lovers. I think Ambrose Bierce is the greatest unrecognized genius in American literature. William Dean Howells, in the 19th century said that Bierce was the third greatest writer of his generation, behind James and Twain. Bierce is largely unknown today, except for the Devil's Dictionary. As far as the woman in question, the woman that I have chosen to be my Emma, is a woman named Emma Frances Dawson. She was, she is, so lost to history—the Wellesley three-volume encyclopedia of Notable American Women has no entry for her. And yet she was surely the foremost woman of letters in the last quarter of the 19th century on the West coast.
I have spent the last 25 years researching her. I started with her obituaries, I got as much data out of them that I could, and the obituaries pretty much agree on three things: That her name was Emma Frances Dawson, that she was born in 1843, in Boston Massachusetts. After about five years of research I found out that all three of those things are untrue. She was born Fanny Emma Dawson, and changed her name to the more elegant Emma Frances; she lied about her age, she was born in 1838, not 1843; and she was born in Bangor, Maine, not Boston. I believe I have copies of all that remain of her letters, which is several hundred. She must've written many more. The obits say that she had an opera voice so exquisite that she was trained in her girlhood by the father of Adelina Patti. Now Adelina Patti was the greatest diva of the great diva age, the greatest singer of the 19th century. She held the boards for half a century—in a world where twenty years was a long career. She began singing at age four, and she never learned to read music. She would have her manager sing the whole opera to her once, sing her part once, and she sang it back and she was good to go. There are dozens of books written on Adelina Patti. Well, to have a voice fine enough to have Patti's father take time to give her lessons, Fanny must been an exceptional singer. What is difficult about this story is that I can find no indication that Emma Frances Dawson ever went to New York City as a girl, and I can pretty well demonstrate that Adelina Patti never got as far North as Boston. Her father brought the family over when she was four, by the time she was six or seven they knew they had a star in Adelina—they were a family of musicians, the mother was a prima donna, the father was a tenore robusto, and they had a bunch of kids, all of whom sang and played musical instruments. But as far as I can see, every biography of Adelina Patti agrees that they stayed in New York, so I don't how Emma Frances Dawson could have had music lessons. Is this another lie of hers? I don't know, but I chose to believe this one. I organized the book around topics, that's why I can make it circular, so singing is one. Writing is one. Loving is one. She lives in San Francisco when the earthquake strikes in 1906, so apocalypse, the end of the world, that will be the last chapter. And then, because I have a feeling that she had an eating disorder, although I can't prove that, the first chapter is about eating.
The book has taken me now 25 years, and it still isn't finished. In part because each of these chapters requires so much research. I spent two years reading about anorexia. I don't know anything about music, so I spent three years reading up on opera. I had her move to Amherst, Massachusetts because of course Emily Dickinson lived there, her initials are E.E.D., so I make her a cousin of Emily Dickinson. Emma Frances Dawson moves there, and Emily Dickinson's father is Edward D. Dickinson so he's E.D.D. I make plays like this in hopes of generating intricate situations. For her literary side I have her implicated in Amherst because Amherst produced the two most notable woman writers of the last half of the 19th century: Emily Dickinson, surely the greatest woman poet in English, and Helen Hunt, who was the most highly remunerated woman writer in last half of the 19th century. They both came from Amherst, and they knew each other. So I set Emma down in that kind of a literary circle. That's basically the genesis.
G:
The title is Pierce. Is that a play on Bierce?
V:
Well, it surely is a play on Bierce, but "pierce" is a very rich word. We have a President named Pierce, we have a common noun, we have piercing in all sorts of different lights, in other words, your heart is pierced—you're touched, that has a sensual connotation; you're pierced with bullets in the Civil War; the mater dolorosa whose heart is pierced with swords… Emma Frances Dawson's father is Irish Catholic so he's a wild blend of conservative and anticlerical.
Right now the title is not only "pierce" but it's Pierce with a line under it. Everyone thinks this is a stupid idea, but I want to try and emphasize the made quality of this book. A line under a word tells the printer to put it in italics. The word is not in italics but with a line under it, so that someone else will print it in italics—the whole notion of the novel as construct, and not only as constructed by me, but constructed by the person who reads me. I like that. Especially because there is no serious attempt to persuade the reader that this really is a found manuscript. There are a thousand indications all the way through that the book is in fact written by the editor, that it is, in other words, an historical novel, not a found document. I was not interested in trying to fake the 19th century because I don't know what that would signify. I want the reader to think about what it means to be historical, what it means to be constructed: Why do we use the past, what are the questions of the past? What does it mean to be in time? I want to signal right in the title itself that we have a made form, as opposed to a found object.
G:
You mentioned before that you have contrasts both on the page, and in the structure; I also saw a lot of contrasts in the content—male and female, the cultured daughter and the pugilistic father—so one of the things I'm wondering is: What about contrasts and conflicts specifically, is that something that you're also trying to make a statement about?
V:
I wouldn't say I was trying to make a statement, but… there's going to be a sentence in the book someplace, I haven't gotten it in yet, but it says, "It was only a human life." And that's what I wanted the book to say. Either you care about this book or you don't, but if you do care about it it's because Emma strikes you as your sister, your fellow human being. And so I try to stage the kinds of conflicts that human beings have, and particularly female human beings. The whole question the 19th century is obsessed with is, "Who am I? What does it mean to be a woman?" is absolutely central. Emma grows up with a variety of models, and she mediates constantly between desires which might be more or less personal, and the roles that society offers her. So there's the constant struggle back and forth between her desires and social desires. Can you separate these? My intent is in no way to talk about the 19th century as repressive. I don't see that it's more repressive than what we have today, but it's more convenient to blame the culture for one's own fears. She is also obsessed with her father, it's very much an Oedipal novel, she seeks out fabulous, unavailable men, like her father. She is brilliantly, brilliantly educated—the real Emma Dawson can do Latin and Greek as well as four or five other languages. Where she learned all that I don't know, but I've invented for her a librarian in Amherst who takes her under her wing and teaches her Latin and Greek, so that she has a Classical education which is based upon imitatsio. You find your model and you enact it, whether it's a saint or whatever. For writers—Milton and then Pope imitate the career of Virgil, they write pastorals, then Georgians, and then they write epics, so she also moves upward with the idea that you become a writer not by Romantic self-expression but by rather learning a craft. At every level it's a question of Apollo versus Dionysus, roles versus desires that can get you in trouble. The mother is as weak and fearful as her father is out of control; he's hyper-macho and the mother is effeminate, so Emma is caught between too much father and too little mother. It's not surprising that she tags up with Bierce who is utterly fabulous and is utterly wild.
G:
What deeper meaning do you explore in the novel? Do they come the point of the story? You sort of answered it already, but if there's anything you want to add…
V:
I worry about the novel being calculated. I move in two ways: I try to set up a chapter, I think I know what I'm doing, and then things just flare out, she just takes over and dictates the chapter. Really, I have a sense of taking dictation. That's like Dionysus, that's the feeling, the speaking, I let it just pour on out, even though it doesn't look anything like Automatic Writing, it's not like John Hawks, whose first drafts are literally almost not narratives, they really are primary process. There's nothing primary process about my first drafts, but I try to go back nonetheless in the literary critical frame of mind and analyze it as Hawks did to his second drafts and try to figure out what it's about. Then I sit down and I write it out, "This chapter seems to be about such and such…" So how can I point various scenes towards this, how can I cut some things and highlight other ones? So I think, to me it has a very built quality, although I'm still discovering so much about what it is…
Without damning myself by comparing small things with great, I'm terribly struck by what Michelangelo said once: That, "A sculptor finds a statue in the block." And all he did was chip away the gross, unnecessary pieces of marble, the statue was already in there. And I guess I feel that with this novel. That the novel's there, it's just that I can't always find it, and that is part of what's taking me so long. I don't have writer's block at all, part of what takes so long is that I've got to earn a living so that I'm always writing in the random spaces. But also part of it is that I think I get chapter that's really golden, and then I go and read it the next year and I see so much more that's got to be highlighted. That's the process, it's a process of discovering, of uncovering. It's archeological much more than prepositional. I don't really think I have anything to say in the sense of telling people what they don't know about their lives. What I try to do is create a structure through which they can experience what it is to be them.
G:
I wanted to talk about the fact that this is still a piece in progress; what are your writing habits? What are your rituals? What kind of process works best for you?
V:
Well, I tend to write in the morning. I wake up shot out of a cannon, I just can't wait to get to the desk and get started. On the other hand I do have rituals. When the weather's better, I live right over by the lake, so I try to get out at the lake when the sun goes up. And then I come back and do yoga or Pilates for a while, then I make myself this awful, but very good for me, green drink from vegetables and algae and whatever. I like to be at the desk at 7:30, I work until noon, then I take a nap—I'm a big one for the nap, I have lunch and take a nap. Then if we're talking about when I'm not teaching, in other words in summer and fall, I'm ready to go straight back to work for the afternoon. I can go just about forever, I love it so much and it's a completely out-of-body experience. As a professor, as a literary critic, I have a tendency to be very, very time-bound. I can tell you without looking at my watch within a minute or two what time it is. It's a terrible sickness. But this Apollonian side completely vanishes when I start to write. I say, "I'm hungry, it must about 10:30"; I look at my watch and it's 2:30. I just literally love it when it happens. Now when it doesn't happen is during the school year. I haven't, in the 23 years, I guess, that I've been working on this, managed to make it a priority over my teaching during my teaching quarters. This doesn't make me a saint, I'm not asking for that, it's just true. I love to teach so much, and the students are doing so much for my classes, and for dissertations and whatever; some professors can just say, "OK, the students get four hours a day and that's that." I've just never been able to do that. So what I try to do is to take a couple of days a week and seal them off, like Tuesday/Thursday, I teach Monday/Wednesday. So what I say to myself each year is that I'll try and do reading and take notes for the various historical parts—the research. That works to some extent, and I certainly enjoy that, it keeps me in contact with Emma Frances, but it doesn't provide anything like the pleasure of actually doing the writing. So it's been rough in this respect. Another difficulty is that when you put the ms away for six months you can't just pick right up again. My heart will beat right away, but it takes me ten days or so to get her voice entirely back in my head. There's a certain amount of lost time, and maybe this is good 'cause it gives me some distance on the chapter. Here's a funny thing, after about 15 years, can't remember exactly when it was, one summer when I started to go back to the novel I said, "Why don't you try and get back in the novel by reading Emma's letters?" So I took out a packet of her letters that I had photocopied and securely put away. I read two lines of the first letter and put 'em all back 'cause her real voice was now so different from the one that she has in the novel I was ruining my sense of who she was! Reality was interfering with my reality, and so I've never taken her letters out again. Every once in a while I open them, and look at them and wish them well, but I don't know whether I'll ever read them again.
G:
What are your biggest challenges when you're writing, and what do you feel your best strengths are? I know you said your strengths are that you can write forever, and that you've got her voice in her head, and your biggest challenge seems to be finding the sculpture in the block.
V:
I would say, unquestionably, that's it, actually knowing what I'm doing. I think I'm a very head-driven writer: I make outlines and I write down things, but as a matter of fact I keep preceding through it cluelessly, and that's one great advantage of going back to it and finding a passage in a section that I thought was just aimless, just underdeveloped, and I'd say, "What's it doing there? What work is it doing?" So that's usually the hardest thing for me, really the amazement that so much of it is intuitive, given all my anxieties about dictating.
G:
Let's talk a little about character. Given the fact that your writing is mostly from the perspective of a woman, do you find that to be a particular challenge, and how do you overcome that? And also, as you're creating Emma's character for yourself, what is that process of her coming to life for you? What happened for you, how did you try to jump-start that?
V:
Well, that's two different questions, as you realize. One is, "How does a man do a woman's voice?" There are certain obvious ways that I try and make her separate from Bierce. I have different syntaxes; she has certain types of syntactic structures that he never uses… there are certain balances, certain dictional choices, for the man, for the woman… but I am by no means sure that I have seen life through a woman's eyes. That would partly be, again, a constructed thing. This is really a book about a man looking—imagining that he's looking—through a woman's eyes, that's really what the book's about, it's not about the fancy story. So part of the construction is that this is a book in every way about an author who's trying to get in touch with his female side. He goes from the biography of a man, to the autobiography of a woman, but places the editorial function right now at the bottom of the page and gives Dionysus as much reign as possible. So it's really a book about an attempt to be androgynous by aligning with the side of oneself that society tends to downplay. It's really much more that than writing like a woman. It's letting my female side come through. We know that Henry James gave Isabelle Archer autobiographical elements, so one of the great woman novels of the 19th century is a closet, or a drag, autobiography. And I'm trying to do something like that. I haven't showed the book to many people, but several of them have been women, and one of the questions I always ask is, "Do you find something that's just wildly off?" And occasionally they have, and I generally see what they were saying, and I change that. But I never let it be my paramount concern. As I said, I think I'm taking dictation: Emma talks, and I wrote it down, that's really the experience that I have. And then I polish and polish and polish. Every chapter has been re-written literally about a hundred times. I try to bring the luster up more; I really do not have the experience of writing, I have the experiences of taking dictation and rewriting.
G:
When you're working and you say you feel like you're taking dictation, does it come chronologically, or do you pick out little points in the book, moments out of time that appear to you later?
V:
Once in a while something will just pop out, and I take a second piece of paper and just start writing when that happens. Very often I'll wake up before sunrise and she'll be talking to me, and I always go to sleep with a pen and pad nearby, so if she wakes me up, or she starts talking at dawn, as she often does, I just write it down. But basically each chapter is very carefully scripted, and we go by the things in her life each day, who she has been and what the conflicts are.
G:
How do you edit? You mentioned that you have a couple people read your work—do you have a regular group of people that do that, or do you just hit people up here and there?
V:
It would be so nice to have a regular group. Kafka read his work regularly to a set of friends—I have nothing like that. I really don't know any writers at all, it's sad and embarrassing. These are a couple of people I show the ms to. One is a friend from college, one is a student of mine from, oh, I'd say twenty years ago, he and I've remained very close friends… Those are the two main ones that I show it to. They're both English teachers and they both teach fiction, so they're very highly qualified to read it, and I'm deeply in their debt. But I'm in the process, now, of trying to find some writers to exchange work with, because obviously writers look at things from a different perspective. And since my novel, whatever else you could say about it, is so strange, so unlike most fiction, that to try and get some writers' takes on it would be good. I have a couple people in mind who I really hope I can strike up reciprocal friendships with.
G:
You mentioned the contrast between the writers and the teachers: What specifically are you looking for?
V:
One, a certain feel of craft that you can only get from people who practice the craft. In other words, this is not that they would be more right, or more useful, it's just a different perspective. One of the more important things that I would hope to get from it is simply to share experience of craft. "Oh, I tried to do this," "Here's how I did it," "I see what you were doing with a sentence," or, "I don't have any idea what you're doing in this sentence," that kind of thing. The second, and the thing I'm less interested in but maybe because I'm being defensive about it, is a sense of the marketplace. To have people who are getting their work out there say, "Oh this will fly and that won't," will be interesting. On the other hand, this is strictly second because I certainly won't change it just because people think that a particular feature of it might not be marketable. And it might even be depressing, but I would still like to be in touch with the market more immediately than I am. The fact that it's going to take me so long to finish it is one of the reasons why I haven't sought a publisher. I'm years away from finishing.
G:
So you do have a timeline set up for yourself?
V:
Oh, I think it will be at least five years, there's one more whole chapter to finish, "The End of the World," the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the end of her life, that will be the center of it. I have collected dozens of books on the apocalypse and fin de siècle, beginnings and endings—there's going to be a lot of magic in this chapter. I have done the research on Greek, Roman, and Egyptian magic, and how magic functioned in the West up through the tradition of Kabbala forming… a whole series of twentieth-century mystical societies. So it's gonna take me years just to read these books and then to decide how to craft it, weave them in.
G:
Back to research, when you're reading these historical texts, and I imagine a lot of what you're reading is fairly dry, how do you give yourself the mindset of, "Here I am back in history and it's alive, I see it, I smell it, I know what's going on"—how do you get yourself there mentally?
V:
I try to let the material take me there. For instance, my heroine's mother's name is Salome. And this is a historical fact, so I've gone back and researched Salome relentlessly. It turns out at the end of the 19th century, turn of the 2oth century, the Chicago World's Fair o f 1893, was where the Hoochie-Coo was developed, and the whole coming forth of Salome at the beginning of the 20th century derives out of this. There's a huge revival of Salome, partly sparked by Oscar Wilde's play, but you have Isadora Duncan and several woman like her who were dancing onstage virtually naked—I mean this was extremely scandalous. Almost all of them were portraying Salome, because the Salome story gave the opportunity to do this. When I'm reading book after book after book about these performing actresses, about the entrepreneurs who were hawking Salome trying to fill their halls, I try to get aback into what it must've been like to go to those performances and then I also try to look for wonderful little nuggets, expressions, sentences that people came up with, telling details. It's really the cash value more than how it smelled and sounded that attracts me. "What can I use for my novel?" And that's really where the vitally and energy comes from, it's not so much trying to re-create the era, it's finding things in the historical era that highlight what it is that I'm trying to do.
G:
Do you have anything else that you want to say along the lines of process to developing writers?
V:
I'm more than forty years older than the writers than you're referring to, and they are probably much closer, in some cases they are definitely closer, to publication than I am, so that I have nothing to say by way of anything I think might be useful to them…
G:
Or questions!
V:
I could ask why I didn't start doing this earlier. When I look at young writers I feel an enormous energy. I feel that it's such a privilege to be at the University of Chicago, to be around so many young writers, and I think it's so wonderful that at last the administration has come on board with the desire of those of us who have been here a long time hoping to really make writing a central feature on the campus. There is money for it, there is support at the level of Deans and the Provosts, and we are really now realizing a dream. I'm very, very encouraged about the present and the future.
G:
Switching gears, let's talk about your role as professor of English here. You asked why you didn't start doing this earlier, and that was one question I wanted to ask you. I know you have a Ph.D. in English, do you also have an M.F.A.?
V:
Yes, I went to Iowa for two years after college, before I went to Berkeley.
G:
Did you workshop with anyone we'd know?
V:
Yes, Bharati Mukherjee was in my year, she was known by her husband's name at that time, I think it's Bharati Blaise, but she has certainly gone on to do very well, some wonderful work. And now I teach her, so it's a real joy to think back on her. She wore her Saris at that time, and she was a really beautiful thing, coming across campus in these wonderful silks…
G:
Then you came back to writing later on, after having done a lot of Henry James criticism. What brought you back?
V:
It's really that I never left. The crucial decision in my life was the crucial decision in everyone's life at Iowa: What do you do next? A certain percentage of people went back to New York and started to tend bar. Vito Acconci was a close friend of mine and he's gone on to become an internationally celebrated guy doing performance art, doing sculpture, doing a whole series of things including writing. He headed back to New York and never wanted to go into the academy. I thought about it for a long time and that just was not for me, that just was not the right path for me. So it never was that I gave up on the creative writing, I just deferred it, and deferred it—until after I got my degree, until after I got tenure… and then in the early '80s… as I think I told you before I don't really remember when this novel started, but I think it was about 1983, Emma Dawson started to talk to me. I woke up in the middle of the night and she was dictating to me, I wrote it down in the dark, I couldn't read it the morning…
G:
Do you find conflicts between thinking analytically and thinking creatively? Do you find that it feeds your creativity, or that it feeds your analysis? Are there two brains?
V:
I think there would be two answers to the two brains question. The answer that I would give is that the only problem I think I've ever had is simply not having very much time. But I could certainly imagine someone hating this novel, and feeling that indeed it is entirely too professorial, that it's too analytical, that it's too fancy; that it puts too much pressure on the reader, it puts pressures on the reader of a kind that only one certain kind of literary critic would ever want to undertake, that it's really not very readable because it's so demanding. What's worrisome is that the opposite critique might also be made: That it's too fragmented, it's too shabby, it doesn't have enough structure. So certain readers won't like it because it's too fragmented, and other readers won't like it because it's so formally intricate.
G:
So you don't find your analytical mindset impinging on your creative abilities?
V:
Well, I can't do the two at once. And particularly when I was writing a lot of literary criticism—it would sound ludicrous to most creative writers, but all of my creativity went into writing those books and articles. I feel that the writing of literary criticism is a creative act, it isn't just done analytically: I'm thinking about the structure of the paragraphs, I'm building them to reach climaxes at the end of paragraphs, I'm trying to craft sentences and make my point tellingly… So I didn't feel that there was a conflict between the two, it's just that when I did the one it was all-consuming. And I believe that fiction is very analytical, depending on different writers. Think of how complicated characters are in novels, think about how complicated critiques of societies are in some novels that have a large social component—that's extremely analytic, so I'm not sure analytic/creative binary exists, and I'm not at all sure that it's a useful distinction, at least for me. There are definitely writers who abhor literary criticism, who don't want to think in certain analytic ways—that doesn't mean they don't think in other analytic ways. I was with Doctorow years ago at a series of readings he was giving in the Quad Cities… I was trying to impress him as a critic, and I said, "Did you know that in every novel you've written you have a hydrocephalic head?" And he raised his hand up and said, "Don't say that!" And quite literally what he wanted to do was to not get too self-conscious about what his unconscious was pouring forth. He didn't want to know too much about his fiction, that's the job of critics, that's the job of readers; I think he was trying to keep his flowpipe as large, open, unclogged and un–self-conscious as possible. There certainly are cases of writers doing insane things that indicate that primary process has virtually taken over, and you just can't believe they say some of the things they say. So what's important is for each writer to adjust how much flow and how analysis is the right mixture for him or her. There's no writer who writes from primary process exclusively. And there's no one who writes just Euclidean geometry, there's always some mixture between the two. And the important thing is to find the mix that fits you, and then to not get bullied out of it by thinking, "Oh, I should do more of one," or, "I should do more of the other." It seems to me some writers are very self-conscious, like Tolstoy; whereas other people, like Doctorow, have a world of structure in their books, but a least certain kinds of things they don't want to know about.
G:
Segueing with that, I'd like to ask you to do a little analysis of your own work. What do you see as the role of the writer? What should a work of literature do, and to extend it, what would you like your book to do when you've finished it?
V:
The function of literature is to produce pleasure.
G:
Just like James, huh?
V:
I think there are a variety of pleasures. I've been thinking a lot about South Africa in this respect, particularly now that South Africa has won the Novel Prize twice, and I know that with Coetzee in particular, but also with Nadine Gordimer, there was a tremendous pressure to write very specifically political stories. And of course we all know about Russia and Socialist Realism, and writing a story about your tractor. I believe that every honest action is political in the sense that… Let me start that sentence over… Thoreau hated reformers, and that wasn't because he didn't think the world needed reforming, but he believed that what you should do is reform yourself. If you took care of yourself, if you made yourself the very best you, and everybody did it, we wouldn't need reform. So I think that each person should be true to him or herself and write the very best book that you can. What communities don't need more of is lies and simplifications. We don't need any more politicians, other used car salesman. For a citizen of South Africa to read a Coetzee novel like Foe, which is a re-writing of Robinson Crusoe, is a positive political action because that citizen is putting himself in the presence of such beauty, such integrity, such seriousness, that that citizen has to be better off for reading that book. I believe if you are really committed to the terrible honesty that is great art, you will be resistant to the lies and simplifications in your culture. So, as with Thoreau, I feel that each writer should take care of himself and leave it to the community to determine what uses the book might be put to; I think that the experience of real pleasure, the pleasure of responding to great art is therapeutic… to be in touch with excellence encourages one to be excellent, maybe that's what I'm getting at. But I think beauty is good for you—not in the immediate realm of relevance. In my own classes I never let myself ask the question of relevance. I believe that a good class is by definition relevant, because the good is always relevant. It's a great danger to go out and try to be relevant, because how do you know that you're not just being ideological? And ideology is exactly the last thing we need: More righteousness, more confidence that I have the truth that everybody else needs… I think that the world needs more and more and more beauty. Beauty is good, I mean, look at the responses to Millenium Park downtown, that jelly bean or whatever the hell it is. People just love to be in the presence of the jellybean. They love to look at Frank Gehry's band shell, they just stand there and look at it. People who are not trained in art history. People who don't know anything about Frank Gehry… but they know that they like to be around it. There's a wonderful feeling down at the park. I think we're starved for beauty.
G:
I'm picking up on one other thing: The fact of your James criticism and your philosophy that reading should be pleasurable. Do you find a lot of James' influence in your work, in your writing, in the way you go about things?
V:
Well, I guess it's a question of comparing small things to great, so it's embarrassing.
G:
Well, I guess, do you take inspiration, how much inspiration do you take?
V:
Oh absolutely. James was a great man, and he suffered disappointments of such magnitude… and he fought back, and fought back, and fought back. For all practical purposes, from 1881 on people didn't buy his books. He kept selling them, to presses… he kept being paid on gold, or in guineas; he knew that he had the respect of the few, but he wanted the royalties from the many, and he didn't get them. But he never quit, he never gave up. And particularly for someone like myself, who has had less than no success in selling my fiction, I find myself looking to, and drawing strength from, the people who fought on when it seemed hopeless. Emily Dickinson lives and dies and 26 poems are published. I'm inspired by the people who kept at the project because they believed in the project. Then I draw a different kind of strength from people like Fitzgerald, who were re-writers. James was basically a writer, he dictated in the morning, Miss Bosanquet typed it up, he corrected it in one draft, and she sent it off. The capacity to do that is just beyond me. That was one way in which James was a Victorian, he was capable of this enormous production of work. I'm a re-writer, so to find out that those magic sentences from Gatsby, which just seem to flow off the end of the pen like lyric song, were in fact re-written 30 times to get that—I take inspiration. Keats, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," was a re-written line from, "A beautiful thing is an eternal joy," or something like that. It was just an embarrassingly clunky, banal first line, and he re-wrote it, he turned it into one of the most famous first lines in literary history. So they're both stories of fighting back, and I have to like these stories.
G:
Going to another genre if you will, the Gothic. You mentioned once that you write a lot of Gothic. I myself don't know a lot about Gothic literature… what particularly about this novel makes it Gothic for you, and what attracts you to the Gothic?
V:
Well, those are two different questions, and they're importantly different because my novel is much, much, much, much less Gothic than I'd expected it to be. I mean I'd never expected that I would produce this book. My novel draws upon the Gothic: The catastrophe of Emma's relationship with Ambrose Bierce occurs on Halloween. So I did a lot of research into Halloween. It is certainly a book about the surfacing of terrible designs—the self out of control, or what does being in control mean. I think the paramount questions that Gothic fiction asks are the questions of this book, the concerns of this book, but it's more a novel of manners than I would've thought I would've written. I suppose this to me is the Jamesian quality again, the novel of manners and Gothic coming together. There are certainly references to Gothic things… Poe was important because he was Bierce's paramount influence. So I think there are recognizable Gothic features in this novel. I think if somebody were to read a hundred pages of this novel I think they would think it much more a novel of manners, a bildungsroman, a young woman's attempt to grow up in a society… I think it's Gothic in the sense that incest is at the very center of it, in the sense of a father-daughter relationship that is much too close. It then poisons her later relationships with men… It's generally concerned with multiple causation: Why people do the things they do, as in fact being a question that can be answered only by seeing three or four reasons… seeing three or four different influences coming together to produce a particular arrangement.
G:
Are you working on any side projects, any shorter stories?
V:
No, this is one hundred percent it. Partly I don't because of the story is made up of hundreds and hundreds of fragments, there are little short stories all the way through it. Even if a chapter is a hundred pages long, it doesn't give you the sense of a hundred pages, it gives you the sense of 300 fragments all glued together. The reader is constantly experiencing relatively short pieces. My hope is that as you step back you will see them connected in various ways.
G:
Any last words, anything else to add?
V:
No, I thank the group for your attention to my work. As you can see, I haven't had much attention. I'm honored that you've given me the chance to have my work included with yours.
Otium
