Paul Metcalf's books include Will West (Jonathan Williams 1956), Genoa (Jargon. 1965), Patagoni (Jargon, 1971), Apalache (Turtle Island, 1976), The Middle Passage (Jargon, 1976), Zip Odes (Tansy Press, 1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior
(Gnomon Press, 1980). This interview was conducted by mail for two and
a half years, beginning in 1975, and will appear in Mr. Metcalf's
forthcoming book, a collection of essays and interviews, to be
published by Gnomon Press.
I: What have been the
influences of modern poetic techniques on your conception of prose? I
should point out two things: first, the poets I have in mind are Pound,
Williams, and Olson; second, I am purposely avoiding the word
"fiction," though you are usually thought of as a novelist.
PM:
The poets, it seem to me, have offered us an opportunity to
"particularize"--i.e., to break a narrative into its particular parts,
and rearrange them according to an original pattern. There is a
significant connection between the images from the world of
electromagnetics, images used in one case by Pound, and the other by
Olson. Pound speaks of the poem as the "rose in the steel dust," and
Olson describes the poem as a thing among things, that must "stand on
its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround
everyone of us. . ." Both these images suggest particles in a state of
chaos, drawn into shape through an act of imagination, but retaining
their character as particles, distinct from one another.
The
American dynamic (in their example, the historical dynamic) is the
separation and exposure of the particles, spread out and shaping, all
in one difficult process, seemingly contradictory but not so, and not
to be easily congealed in the European manner--particularly in Olson's
and Williams' view--not brought together, but spreading and shaping in
one gesture, as in the "big bang" theory of the origin of the universe,
spreading and shaping.
The poet Clark Coolidge works
with even smaller particles--individual words and syllables--and in
correspondence with me he has used these phrases: "just what are words
& what do they do?"--"manipulation of language particles"--"words
surrounded by spaces"--and "particles are interesting."
Compared
to all this, the conventional novel, with its sequential flow of
events, seems less "original," or, more simply, less appropriate to the
character and quality of American life today.
A careful reading of Moby-Dick,
by the way, will show how modern it is, how much in line it is with
what I am talking about here, After a conventional novelistic opening,
Melville quickly particularizes, interjecting (between narrative
sequences) particles of cetology, the practice of whaling, etc.--"the
ballast of the book," as Van Wyck Brooks put it. Has anyone ever made a
comparative study of Moby-Dick and Paterson?
Is Moby-Dick a poem written in prose?
(Clark
Coolidge once tried seriously to find any reference to Melville in
Williams' writings. The closest he could come was in a letter Williams
wrote to someone: "Flossie is now reading Moby Dick." No more.)
(And when Olson published Call Me Ishmael,
he gave a copy to Pound, and asked him to send it on to Eliot, to see
if Eliot could arrange for an English edition. . . .Pound obliged, with
a note to Eliot: "I recommend that you publish it, it's a labor-saving
device-you don't have to read Melville.")
But this
is another matter, that I will get into later: the artificial
separation of 19th and 20th centuries. Pound and Williams were
evidently so aware of themselves as innovators that they were not
altogether conscious of their heritage.
I: When you
eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional novel (i.e.,
plot, and sometimes even characters), what becomes the principle of
unity? How do you move from point A to point B?
PM:
The principle of unity is "the rose in the steel dust," and I can be no
more specific than to say that this is something inside me, and that
effecting its transfer, from inside my skin to outside it, is the
reason for writing (as well as the process). The pattern may be clear
in its details--or nebulous, only vaguely intuited--but the pursuit,
the delineation of its outlines dictates every step--or at least
dictates what is point A and what is point B. Then--how to get from A
to B--this is best done abruptly. I learned long ago, from a
very wise man, that "the only real work in creative endeavor is keeping
things from falling together too soon." A corollary to that notion
would be that, having held the structural elements apart as long as
possible, when they do come together, let them really clang.
And this is not work, it is only the courage to move abruptly. Nothing
softens and muddies a piece of writing so much as what used to be
taught in writing classes as "transitions." Let the relation of your
particles be implicit, discoverable by the reader. When you have
accomplished this, you will have a quality that Guy Davenport has used
in describing my writing: tensegrity (which, as near as I can
make out, is one of Bucky Fuller's neologisms, meaning that when you
erect a structure, if all the lines holding it are taut or tense, it
will stay up. Tension=integrity.).
It might be worth
adding that one doesn't always travel from point A to point B. It might
be from A to point L, for example--with points B through K inferred.
I: To continue with these connections. Genoa,
I think, is a tightly written book, each of whose pages seems to
reverberate with echoes of other pages. I can see the smile on your
face as you came across a passage in Columbus about feet or a line in
Melville about heads: connections, Did you have to keep charts, listing
such references, when you were writing Genoa? Did you consciously seek out material that would set up these echoes?
PM:
I am flattered that you consider Genoa a tightly written book--this is
as I would want it to be. And I humbly (proudly?) confess to the many
smiles that crossed my face, as the rhymes and reflections emerged. No,
I didn't have to keep charts; my notes, although lengthy and complex,
never exploded beyond 8-1/2 x 11 (almost entirely handwritten) . In
developing the thing, I functioned pretty much according to the premise
I outlined for Carl and Michael. I "intuited" the Columbus-Melville
connection, by which I mean that a body of knowledge about them, of
which I was only dimly aware, may have existed somewhere within me, and
when I began to open it (i.e. , research the lives and writings of the
two men), the revelations came as a series of confirming surprises.
I
draw the line, however, at your last suggestion. I did not consciously
seek out these echoes. I didn't have to. They were all there. All I had
to do was find them. And having found them, I then followed the dictum
of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe: "There is no greater mistake than the
supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or
inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly
to combine."
I: One of your methods for "combining"
is juxtaposition, which you do not use as a substitute for clumsy
metaphors but rather as a way of focusing sharply on the "particles."
PM:
I am much happier, and always have been, with the word juxtaposition
than I am with metaphor. Another term I have used is mosaic, and my
friend Don Byrd speaks of immense rhymes: "you pick up these unlikely
chunks, and they do slip together, like a perfect tenon mortise joint."
And, yes, this is a constant in my work, this approach.
I
think there's a reason why Don uses the word "immense." I'm not doing
anything much different from a good poet, putting two words or two
phrases together in an original way--or a good colorist in painting,
Joseph Albers for example, looking for the chemistry of this yellow
against this lavender, etc.; the difference is simply the size and
proportion of the units I use: instead of words or phrases, I use whole
lives, concepts, episodes or epochs.
I: In The
Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss talks about the attention that
primitive people gave to naming objects, which they then would put to
magical uses, such as curing illnesses or freeing themselves from
curses. He says that such naming and use of objects is of no
"scientific" value but that these activities meet "intellectual
requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs. The real
question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker's beak does in fact
cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from
which a woodpecker's beak and a man's tooth can be seen as 'going
together' . . . and whether "some initial order can be introduced into
the universe by means of these groupings" (emphasis added). I want to
ask whether your juxtapositions do not serve the same purpose--to group
objects in order to create an order.
PM: I've
thought a lot about this lately--the magic of simply naming things, and
then the virtues (homeopathic, among others) of associating, perhaps in
a new way, the named and/or described objects, episodes, histories,
landscapes, etc. There is certainly a parallel here, between what I try
to do and what Levi-Strauss describes among primitive peoples. In my
books, it can be found in its simplest form in Zip Odes, which is
nothing but names, regrouped; it is this philosophical thrust, I think,
that gives a serious tone to what is otherwise a flippant book. It
exists at a more sophisticated level, of course, in the other books,
where rather than simply a single place, I am dealing with complex
entities, histories, cultures, geographies, etc.
This
is nothing that I ever set out to do consciously: to be "primitive."
It's just that I'm sure there was an instinctive feeling, when I was
younger, that the old European groupings, the associations and premises
of Western civilization that we Americans inherited, were worn out, and
that a new grouping and shaping, a new "rose in the steel dust," based
on a renaming and redescribing, was called for.
It's
interesting to see, among readers, whether this works or not. For Guy
Davenport, it obviously does: speaking of the three major themes in
Genoa, he says that I make "them touch just when they can speak in
concert, disclosing ironies, deepening the intuitive evidence that
there is a plot to American history." For Robert Von Hallberg (writing
in Parnassus, Fall/ Winter, 1978), the method obviously does not work:
"Genoa is a mad book . . .this paranoid modernist view . . . Michael's
contrivances are hilarious . . .this outrageous book."
There
is, I suppose, a certain fatuous aspect--at least one exposes himself
to ridicule--in trying to be primitive in a sophisticated world. But it
is an important question you raise, and the answer is, yes, all my
books must be understood, if they are to be understood at all, in terms
of something very close to what Levi-Strauss is talking about. For
someone like Von Hallberg, who apparently doesn't share my mistrust of
the old groupings, an attempt to restructure must appear "hilarious"
and "outrageous."
I: In my review of Middle Passage
I made my own speculations about the possible connections among the
Luddites, slaves, and whales. Without asking you to explicate the book,
I would like to know what the basis is for grouping these three.
PM:
Aside from choosing the sub-title ("A Triptych of Commodities"), and
not thinking about it a great deal, about its implications, there was a
great deal of innocence on my part in selecting and associating the
materials in The Middle Passage, I don't honestly recall how the
choices were made; I remember beginning with the Luddites, and then
sort of waiting to see what other fish would come swimming by, catching
the slaves and the whales as they came close in.. When the manuscript
was finished, I remember showing it to a friend with a Marxist
background--and then being surprised, and a little annoyed, when she
put a Marxist interpretation on it, and then suddenly, innocently,
realizing, why, of course! What a logical extension, I've practically
said it myself, the exploitation of commodities.
Now,
of course, although I wouldn't want the book viewed exclusively in
Marxist terms, such an interpretation doesn't bother me. Perhaps just
the intellectual in me is bothered a bit, that I didn't think of it
myself.
I: In looking for fresh language, perhaps
another of those "unlikely chunks," you turn to the cadences and
structure of some 19th century writers as well as to "languages" that
are usually thought non-literary--scientific, anthropological, medical,
mechanical, and so on. Such "jargon" lends a new shape to a line,
alters appearance, and finally gives a new conception to the objects
that are being looked at.
PM: There's a lot to
comment on in this question, particularly the way you've phrased it.
First of all, I took and take seriously Dr. Williams' remark that
anything is legitimate subject matter for a poem. (As a corollary to
this, I would want to say that the subject matter of a work of art
matters only in that it be something about which the artist cares
passionately.) Having accepted this, one looks around at language, and
realizes that within the various complex disciplines and specialized
areas of knowledge that have developed over the years in both the
sciences and the humanities (and particularly in those so-called
sciences of man, such as anthropology) unique bodies of language,
representing idiosyncratic modes of thought, have grown up; these have
remained more or less isolated from the broad areas of language that
are generally drawn into literature. Why not mine then?--particularly
inasmuch as so many of these linguistic organizations are so
extraordinarily beautiful, They are part of our legitimate contemporary
resource. Anthropology, ethnology, mythology, archeology, geology,
physiology--all are there, waiting for admission into poetry.
Furthermore, as you say, any object or process may be altered and
freshened by the language we use to describe it. This is part of the
excitement of literature, this chemistry of rich and varied language;
this is a large part of why we read, the search for this freshening!
I: What then for you constitutes a good line of prose?
PM:
I'm not sure I can answer this question analytically. It sounds as
though a proper answer, once achieved, would at once enter the
textbooks and there after be taught, and I don't think writing "a good
line of prose" can be taught. It breaks down into 1) what is said?
(this involves both extent and limits), and 2) what is the appeal to
the ear (i.e., what is the music?). It is sometimes forgotten that
prose is as much involved with music as is poetry. Clark Coolidge is a
great Moby-Dick fan, has read the book eight or nine times, and one
winter, over a period of several weeks, he read it aloud, a chapter at
a time, to his wife. He said that when he got to the final chapters,
the chase, the climax, he could hardly go on, he was breathing
asthmatically, tears were streaming down his face. This intense
emotional acceleration was simply the effect of adding the voice (i.e.,
music) to the process of reading--music that was already in the text,
unrealized, until read aloud.
I might also add
George Oppen's remark, which would apply to both prose and poetry:
"When the man writing is frightened by a word, he may have started."
I:
You have talked at other times about the place of voice in both poetry
and prose. I have a few questions that relate to this, and you can pick
them up in whatever order you wish: 1) what do you mean by "voice"? 2)
how do you go about putting "voice" into your prose? 3) doesn't this
all lead to minimizing the differences between poetry and prose?
PM:
It seems to me that every powerful piece of writing, be it poetry or
prose, reveals the presence of the author--this is the reason we read
him, for his idiosyncratic force. Be he romantic or classical,
subjective or objective, distant or intimate, his more-or-less unspoken
motive is self revelation. (This is one of the problems with bad
writing, the author's failure to acknowledge this, his attempts to
"mask" himself. A theatrical mask, on the other hand, properly used,
aims at revelation: character revealed by hiding the hypocritical mask
of the face.) I tend to view my work as process, and I seem to have
used several different devices to plunge a voice into the writing:
Will West: Will, as an Indian mask, a persona, through whom flows mythology and history.
Genoa:
The mind of Michael Mills: he is more static than Will, but the whole
thing moves through him, and is projected: Michael as a static movie
projector, the novel, disjointed and rejoined, thrown up on a
screen--and at times, I, Paul Metcalf, almost ignore my own projector,
Michael Mills, and fire my own shots at that screen. The distinction is
wearing thin.
Patagoni: The persona is gone
altogether; now there is just the author and his materials. Rightly or
wrongly, I am in pursuit of more direct contact with the reader, trying
to achieve this in two ways: 1) inviting the reader's involvement in my
choice, organization and exposition of concerns, or pigments, or
mosaics; and 2) devoting the last chapter to unedited diary and
letters, traditionally two of the most intimate forms.
My whole career is a process of conversion, of attaining some degree of control over prose, and then converting it into poetry.
Being
still somewhat involved in this process, being aware of elements of
both prose and poetry in my work (I am not a pure poet, whatever that
is), I have thought a good deal about the two areas, about the
traditional assumption of difference between them, and whether these
assumptions may be challenged; about movement from one to the other,
and back; about whether there is a point of junction, a seam that may
be worked, a tightrope that may be essayed. I am intrigued that so many
poets seem impelled to define poetry, and none of these definitions
quite succeeds. And so many writers who work in both fields seem to be
better in one or the other, for reasons hard to determine.
The poet Howard Moss has wrestled with these definitions:
"
. . . time is different for the novelist and the poet, for the fiction
writer is dominated by the clock and the poet by the metronome. They
are just dissimilar enough--metronomes can be sped up, slowed down, or
stopped--to provide a fertile field of transaction."
True enough, But then he creates somewhat simplistic categories:
"The
mirror is the totem of the poet, who looks at and into himself, who
creates himself, as it were. And I would say the window belongs to the
fiction writer, who looks out and around, and is a product of the
world."
And he goes on:
"From the
beginning of this century, poetry and fiction have borrowed from each
other, imitated each other, and in some cases become each other. . . .
In the love affair that has occurred in this century, the novelist has
flirted with mirrors and the poet with windows." ("The Poet's Story,"
Prose, #7, Fall, 1973.)
And that's exactly the point.
For
my own part, I can say that there is some profound difference between
poetry and prose, and that I have qreat difficulty defining it. As a
worker, I am not sure that definition is necessary -it may not even be
desirable--and I find it difficult, therefore, to work a seam, or tread
a tightrope. I am more conscious of passage back and forth, from one to
the other, as though, in walking the earth, I were traversing two vague
but powerful geomagnetic fields.
I: You seem to be
saying two things at once about "voice": 1) that by putting the voice
into writing, the author's personality is revealed, and 2) that this
voice makes the style idiosyncratic or personal.
PM:
When I spoke about using several different devices to plunge a voice
into the writing, I think I made an unfortunate choice of words; I was
putting the cart before the horse. One doesn't "plunge" a voice in; I
think it's more as Mr. Poe has it, as I've quoted him earlier on the
subject of originality: "To originate is carefully, patiently, and
understandingly to combine." Of course, there's much more to it than
that; the mere exercise of care, patience and understanding will not
produce the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. But what Poe was trying to do
here is to de-mystify the process of creation, and I think he is
accurate in suggesting that it is in these very processes of combining
that "voice" does (or does not) emerge. And "emerge" is the accurate
term; no amount of injection will help.
How is it
that when we turn on the radio in the middle of a concert and they're
playing a symphonic piece, we don't exactly recognize it but something
about it makes us say, "ah-ha, that's Beethoven," or "yes, that's
Brahms "? Something in the way the elements of the music are chosen,
and then combined, creates a recognizable signature, and this, I think,
is what I mean by "voice." With the less gifted, the less distinctive
composer, all you can say is, "well, that sounds like 18th-century,"
etc.; the single voice does not emerge. To what extent I personally
have been innocent of "injecting," successful in permitting to
"emerge," that is not for me to judge.
I: Would that section "Processes on the Crank Box" from Patagoni illustrate one of your uses of voice?
PM:
If you ever heard me read this section aloud, I think you would have
your answer. I read it just as fast (and as loud) as my lips and tongue
can move--with the nursery rhymes interjected lightly, softly, gently.
Again, the key is juxtaposition: how better could I exemplify what I
feel to be the essential extremes and paradox of Henry Ford's
nature--the relentless corporate dictator, and the sentimental,
nostalgic rube?
I: Ford's love of "hard facts" also
seems to be your love--therefore your growing use of documents.
Wouldn't it have been possible for you to have written these books
without using these historical and biographical materials as source and
content? In other words, couldn't you have "fictionalized" these
things? Couldn't you have "made up" the past?
PM: I
don't know if I can answer this precisely--except that it was a notion,
shared perhaps with Olson more than anyone else, a notion that we both
picked up from Pound and Williams, that is very much a part of Melville
(again look at the cetology in Moby-Dick)--a notion that the old masks
and artifices of conventional fiction, and of "baring-of-the soul"
poetry, were worn out, or seemed no longer useful tools for us, here,
now--and that the simple facts of our situation, of our history, were
the richest possible lode, begging to he mined.
Having
once chosen to be "factual," the writer gets into interesting
situations. First, there is the old saw: what are facts, what is
reality?--reality is whatever any given group of people can agree it
is. Historians argue endlessly over what history is. Is there such a
thing as an incontrovertible objective fact? Is all knowledge
subjective?
Since the natural mode of art is
artifice--masks, fiction, indirection--the writer is hobbled when he
goes to the typewriter with the intention of conveying pure fact. The
reader, long accustomed to indirection, assumes that the writer's facts
are simply another artifice, another mask. The old folk notion of
art-as-prestidigitation dies hard. How do you tell the reader that you
are not trying to "magic" him? And are you sure that you are not trying
to do just that, even with facts?
Americans, as
empire-builders, are quite naturally a pragmatic people, who respond
quickly to "the facts of the matter" and whose politicians love to talk
about something they call "straight talk." Back to the 19th century
again: part of the hold that Poe and Melville have on the world's
imagination stems from the odd mix of fact and fancy, invention and
autobiography, pragmatism and kleptomania, that went into their work.
Poe invented that uniquely native form, science fiction. Poe set out to
con us. Was he also conning Poe? Melville occasionally hid plagiarism
behind the mask of autobiography. But today, there is still that
insistent American hunger for the facts: Watergate had to occur, so
that we could expose it; hard core porn was inevitable (the genital
mechanics, in living color); Truman Capote invented "the non-fiction
novel" (some years after Genoa, I note); and now we have Doonesbury,
fact and fiction intertwining in the comic strips.
I
go into all this to explain, in a round-about way, that it is not my
preoccupation with facts, but a national phenomenon. And all the facts
are not yet in.
I: Isn't Patagoni, in which you take off the mask and put yourself directly into the book, a matter of "baring the soul"?
PM: Okay, here we go again: putting myself into the work--injecting myself, if you wish. So be it.
I
think that when I do put myself into the work directly, the obvious
case being the diaries and letters in Patagoni--the distinction between
that and what I call "baring-the-soul" poetry is a matter of both
substance and style. Herb Leibowitz served as a reader for the Fourth
Pushcart Prize Anthology, and he writes about the labors that entailed:
"A depressing sameness ran through most of the poems: solipsism is in
the saddle galloping from one bland event and trite epiphany to the
next. The massive self-regard was stupefying and finally scary. For the
rare reflective poem . . . there were dozens about childhood
experiences with grandparents or siblings, the poets rummaging in the
attic of memory for tattered bits of nostalgia, of fistfuls in which
the poets stood outdoors, in a pasture, watching a mare throw her foal,
for the purpose of recording the scene in a poem," more sinister than
these relatively innocent effusions are those self obsessed creatures
of the Me-Decade who are organized around a particular school: The New
York School, say, with its sanctification of trivial diurnities, or the
Freudians, dragging with them wherever they go a trail of personal
garbage, like exposed intestines.
The me I have
injected (if we must use that term) into my writing is free, I would
hope, of all this. The dynamic is not inward but outward: the world
observed and experienced. The little Indian boy peeing on the
mountaintop in the Andes: I don't have the sense that he did that just
so I could write a poem about it.
I am there, up front, nothing shy. But I have left my suffering soul elsewhere. It is the world that concerns me.
I: Is everything in Middle Passage and Apalache taken directly from other sources without any changes or additions of your own?
PM:
I did a little cheating there. There are places where I've linked
things in my own language without so acknowledging. I would say that
Middle Passage is substantially taken from other sources, there may be
transitions, there may be occasional rewordings of my own, but very
minimal, I would almost have to go through Apalache and see where I did
what. I think that about the same would apply there. I occasionally
made transitions or rephrased things, but where I've changed phrasing
it's certainly in the spirit of my source. I've never violated a
source; I've never exaggerated a source or twisted a source to serve
some purpose.
I: Then what constitutes your work? If not the words, then what?
PM:
My work exists on several levels. It exists in the initial instinct
which then becomes a kind of conception; to what extent conscious and
to what extent I verbalize it to myself, may vary a great deal. It may
simply be an instinct of putting certain things together which in the
past have not been put together and which I feel have an organic
association. I often have an idea of something I want to do or
something I want to look for, and I start researching. I go through a
great many books or a great many sources until suddenly I hit upon
something and say, "Wow! This is it, this is what I've been looking
for." I may not even at that point know why it is that I get that "wow"
response. All right, the original conception of wanting to do
something--present an idea or present a sense of a place or a people or
simply a philosophical idea--that is mine. And the material that I
choose is an act of choice on my part which again is me at work. And
thirdly, the way I associate the materials, order them, the relative
weight I give them in relation to one another, the juxtapositions--all
that's my own work. And I think that's a valid creative process. What
am I doing differently, for example, from a poet who takes words and
puts them together in a new way? He didn't invent the words; the words
are common property. Likewise, the conceptual material, the scientific
material, are common property which I have selected. I am using chunks
rather than individual words, It's no different, really, except in the
matter of proportion.
I: So there is no difference between a poet or novelist who "makes up" a poem or a story and what you do?
PM:
That's difficult to answer. Apparently in terms of the reader, there
are some difficulties in becoming adjusted to my method. A great many
readers seem to have difficulty in dealing with that; several critics
recently, even those who have spoken favorably of the work, seem to
have to go through the process of explaining the novelty of my method.
In the final conclusion, I don't think there is any difference, I've
always felt that there wasn't any difference; just my way of working
with materials. They are all materials. We can give an example of the
cubist painters back in the early part of the century, someone like
Kurt Schwitters putting thumbtacks in clippings from magazines onto
canvases. He is taking objects of another source than the pigments, so
to speak. I don't see that there is any difference in that and what I
am doing.
I: So that, for instance, one might use items from a newspaper in making a poem, such as Williams did?
PM:
Why not? My sense of how good a form something might be relates to my
remarks about the procedure, the conception, the idea, In Middle
Passage, for instance, my first instinct for that was in a magazine
article I read about the Luddites. That was a blank; I knew only
vaguely that they were machine-wreckers. Then I got fascinated, "Wow,
that's something I want to know more about." Then down the line I began
to think that I am going to want other associations. But it began with
that response. Why, I don't know. But to do that in a random way, the
way I object to in Bill Burroughs, in his "cutup" novels, where you're
dealing strictly with the accident--the juxtapositions are not
intelligent, they're accidental. That becomes uninteresting to me. I
don't think of myself now, though I did when I was younger, as an
avant-garde or experimental writer. Underlying whatever I've done is an
essentially conservative artistic structure which is not revolutionary
or experimental.
I: Perhaps we are talking about
preconceptions that a reader brings to a book. If he knows that it's
"non-fiction," then he expects . . .
PM: Yes, to
shake up those expectations. Then I would say that I am an experimenter
or a trouble-maker. That is all fun to me and I enjoy it very much. I
enjoy making readers nervous. It doesn't bother me in the slightest if
they can't deal with the material in that way. I've got a poem I don't
think you've seen called "Willie's Throw," a baseball poem. The way
that poem came about was that somehow or other I got hold of a book
called My Greatest Day in Baseball in which each star describes what he
thought was the greatest play he had made. And when I got to Willie
Mays, he talks about catching the ball, spinning around, and throwing
it like a discus thrower. Then I got this idea. Let's get literal. I
said, What is the act of a discus thrower? Then I went back and mined
all the classical sources. The juxtaposition becomes funny. It wasn't
really funny to me, but I could see how the result was funny though. I
was working intentionally there. To the extent that the poem works, it
works because it has a real form and a real structure, and those
juxtapositions are not accidental.
I: What's the difference between seeing the original source and then seeing it juxtaposed with something else?
PM:
It's the intelligent juxtaposition. By intelligent I'm simply saying
that some thinking or emotion has occurred in the author before the
actual choice and juxtaposition are made. That intelligence only
becomes evident when we can see that juxtaposition and realize that
something happened in this guy which made him choose these things. But
again, this is a problem for readers. They want to know whether this is
prose or poetry. They want it to be one or another. I can see how in
one way this is a legitimate concern for the reader. However, I say,
What are you worried about? Just sit down and read the thing.
I: Again, we have Williams' Paterson.
PM:
I got a tremendous amount of my method out of Williams. I think that I
got more from Paterson in terms of my method than from any other book,
with the possible exception of Melville. I think that Moby-Dick can be
read as a poem which happens to be written in prose. It's surprising to
me that people have difficulty with my books on that level when there
is such a tradition in our background that is aiming in precisely that
direction.
I: Do you come across materials that you want to use but that somehow do not fit?
PM:
Frequently. I may come across something in the library and I get that
"wow" feeling ("this is the most beautiful thing, this states exactly
what I've been trying . . . "). Then I get into the actual process of
writing and see that that thing doesn't work. It just doesn't belong,
frequently because it says it too accurately or too precisely. It makes
my point in a way that will almost obviate the necessity for the rest
of the book. I would lose all the power that comes from indirection or
suggestion.
I: What is the measure for books such as
Middle Passage and Apalache? What is the appropriate critical norm when
an author is using real people as characters and the styles of other
writers?
PM: It's a very old-fashioned standard that
is the same that we would use for any work of art: how powerfully does
it move us, how strong and significant is the governing idea, how
attractive does this writer's view of the world appear to us? These are
almost cliches. I have a daughter, incidentally, who's now twenty-three
years old. She's not a reader but she's very, very bright. She says
very little to me about my work and has not even read all of it. She
read Apalache recently and said, I've learned something from reading
your book--you're a closet romantic, She said, Do you know what this
Apalache is? I said, No, what is it? She said, It's a love poem. I
said, What do you mean? She said, You're in love with North America.
Now that to me is as lovely a response as I've gotten to that book. I
was perhaps partially aware, though never verbalized it as such, that
that was the kind of thing I was aiming for. But that's a very
old-fashioned idea; nothing novel about that. She was simply a person
who was not bothered by the novelty of the technique. Perhaps she was
saved from that because she hadn't read that much. She could come at it
as a fresh object. She didn't have the burden of traditions to worry
about.
I: Perhaps it is a love poem, and yet, like your other books, it tends to be dark.
PM: More so in Middle Passage, and less so in Apalache. But I see what you mean. I have no quarrel with that.
I:
But even Apalache ends with the massacre and disappearance of the
Indian tribe. There is this darkness that pervades all the books.
PM:
Yes. But I do not think of myself as a dark person or a dark writer. I
don't set out to deal with the dark underside of history. I jocularly
characterize myself as a cheerful pessimist. I like to think that one
of the things that saves my work from mere gloom is its energy. If
there is enough energy brought to bear on what is being handled, that
will carry the materials without the reader being overwhelmed by the
devastation.
I: In both Middle Passage and Apalache there is this strange mixture of awe and horror as you look at American life and history.
PM:
Yes, I'm guilty of that cliche'. I think that's what my daughter meant
when she said that I'm a closet romantic. And I said, Maybe it isn't so
much in the closet.
I: You have already mentioned
several writers you have learned from, I would like you to list those
writers who you think have made the most important innovations in
fiction since about the turn of the century, The obvious purpose here
is to shed an indirect light on your own work, though I am not
primarily interested here in which authors have "influenced" you.
PM: I'm not going to answer precisely as it is asked, but I hope that when I'm finished you'll have what you're looking for.
In
the first place, you mention the turn of the century, and I know it's a
great temptation to treat this as a turning point, because so much that
has happened since then "looks" different, so much writing--as well as
painting, music, and the other arts--gives the appearance of virgin
birth. This is an appearance enthusiastically fostered by the writers
and artists themselves--and this leads us into the theories of Harold
Bloom:
"To live, the poet must mis-interpret his
literary father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the
rewriting of the father." Consequently a poet is not a man speaking to
other men, but "a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man
(the precursor) outrageously more alive than himself." The great poetic
ambition, which only the strongest poets achieve, is to appear self
begotten, not only free of the father but . . .the father's father.
(From a review by Edward W. Said of A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom
(Oxford University Press, 1975), in The New York Review of Books, April
13, 1975.)
I think for the word "poet," as it is used here, we may safely substitute "writer" or "artist."
In
any case, I am much more interested in a flow, a progression, out of
the 19th into the 20th century. We can easily see Picasso's use of
primitive African sculpture and prehistoric cave paintings, but it is
also evident that the forms (trees, rocks, apples, etc.) of Cezanne's
most mature paintings are pregnant with cubism. Similarly, Pound,
Williams, and Olson--whatever they may or may not have
acknowledged--and despite or in addition to their classical concerns-
these men sprang directly from Melville and Whitman, just as Melville's
stories and short novels could not have been written, at least in their
particular form, had not Poe preceded him.
To add a mathematical note: Dreiser was a full-grown man of twenty while Melville and Whitman were still around.
Okay.
To make a distinction, now, between writers one clearly recognizes as
influences, and writers one has read, and admires, objectively, as
innovators, but without tracing a direct influence: this introduces an
interesting gray area, where the two groups come together. My views
here may be somewhat special, because of my own inheritance from
Melville. Except for a casual, teen-age reading of Moby-Dick, I put off
reading Melville until my late twenties--after I had already written
Will West. When I did read him, seriously and systematically, it was of
course a revelation, but a revelation of something that was already
there. This experience may have something to do with my notion that
influences may be "in the air," so to speak, and it is possible for a
writer to be influenced by books he has never read. Any writer, in a
given place and time, swims in inherited currents common to other
writers of the same place and time, whether he is aware of this or not.
I give expression to this idea in the fragments of knowledge with which
I endow Carl Mills, in Genoa: having him quote verbatim, for example,
from the Journals of Lewis & Clark.
With this caution in mind, I offer the two following lists:
Influences
Melville
Pound
Williams
Olson
Lawrence
Dostoyevsky
New York 50's Painters
Frederick Delius
Ralph Vaughn Williams
Faulkner
Others
Douglas Woolf
Clancy Sigal
Ken Kesey
William Gass
Guy Davenport
Sherwood Anderson
Thomas Pynchon
Charles Ives
Clearly, both lists are incomplete, and other names will occur to me from time to time, but I will let this stand.
I: There doesn't seem to be a common link among these influences.
PM:
I can understand why you are baffled. I am somewhat baffled myself. One
easy possibility occurs to me: what I am presenting here is simply a
paradox; for example, the lush romantic (Delius, Vaughn Williams) side
by side with the hard-edged modernist (New York 50's painters, Douglas
Woolf). A "paradox" is one of those lovely words that allows me to sit
here with a beatific smile, and not explain.
Going
further, perhaps, I am reminded of my daughter's remarks about my being
a closet romantic. That a man trying to regroup the elements of his
culture, as Levi-Strauss describes, could be moved and influenced by
the music of Delius and Vaughn Williams--well, perhaps this ain't quite
the paradox it appears to be. As we set ourselves up in the front lines
of what we conceive to be the "avant-garde," we unconsciously and
willy-nilly drag all sorts of baggage from the rear, our own rear. And
this, "paradoxically," may in fact strengthen our so-called
"modernism." The poet Kenneth Irby, who writes in a thoroughly modern
mode, and is especially strong on American Western and Middle-western
themes, is absolutely obsessed with the music of Delius.
I'm
not sure how this process works, or if it will stand further
investigation. Perhaps it will, although probably not by me. I know
that those avant-gardists who lack this paradoxical combination strike
me as strident and flat.
I: I can largely agree with
what you say about the "artificial" differences that are frequently
made between the 19th and 20th century; there is evidence for this
wherever one looks, if one looks. Your point is particularly well made
about Melville. I have been rereading Chekhov and see that a Hemingway
doesn't exist without this Russian doctor having first broken the
ground; perhaps Joyce's Dubliners doesn't exist either, though Joyce
said that he had not read Chekhov. Or one can read Nerval and see that
he made Eliot possible. It wasn't, as we may read in the textbooks, a
world war, the decline of Christianity, or Freud; it might be these
too, but it was first a Nerval demonstrating that language and
structure could be used in a new way. Willing to discard the cliches
about the differences between this century and the last, are you also
willing to minimize the differences between the literatures of
different countries? (Is that a growl I hear coming from the East?) Is
there an "American" literature?
PM: There is an
American literature, despite all: --something in the character and
fibre of the writing that the best writers can't escape, even if they
wanted to. The Europeans know this, they recognize ourselves. Go back
to Poe, and the response to him in France. Go back to the early
American naturalists, the Bartrams, etc., the way they were mined by
the British poets. Hell, go back to The Tempest, Shakespeare's last
major play, oddly different from his other works--as though he were
issuing a signal: something new has been added. Ever since then,
however much Europe has fought us, patronized us, maligned us, fawned
over us, she has demonstrated an often secret appetite for us, and a
sharp eye for ways in which we reveal ourselves.
Just
what it is, in modern terms--this distinctly American literature--has
become increasingly difficult to recognize, as the body of our work
splinters, becomes diffuse. Some years ago, the whole world of modern
painting became galvanized around the Abstract Expressionists, and the
capitol of the art world moved dramatically from Paris to New York.
Nothing that singular has happened in American writing; and American
painting, today, is similarly scattered.
There is
something about the consciousness of the American writer, though, that
I would like to explore--particularly in terms of the concept of
international influences that you mention: the spores are airborne,
like the spores of the morel mushroom, so that the crop sprouts in
different places every year.
We have heard much of
the Sense of Place in American literature, and certainly Place vs.
Mobility has been a major concern of mine (see Patagoni). This is
partly due to the historical growth of the country--Place is something
we are always leaving, in search of a shifting Frontier (and
accompanying this--whether we allow it to surface or not--is a powerful
strain of nostalgia, for all those Places we've left behind). Partly,
also, it is a conscious attempt to use Place as a means of breaking
ties with the Old Country, of establishing a native American culture.
Much of William Carlos Williams' thought on this subject sounds
slightly dated today--and yet the effect of his thinking, in his
magnificent poetry and prose, shows it to have been indispensable. And
this, despite the fact that, as time passes, scholars may some day
point out that he sounds ever-so much like this or that French or
Russian or (God help us!) English writer.
What I'm
talking about here is process, elements of which may seem
contradictory, or at least paradoxical. In any case, the writer puts
down roots, deals with what is at hand, is more or less conscious of
himself as an American. There may also be spores blown on the wind,
emanating from Afghanistan and Antarctica--who knows?--but the writer
better not waste his time courting them; this can be as futile as
courting the Muse. And the recognition of these spores is emphatically
after the fact, a matter of interest to those of us who read the work,
later. So--the writer works within the limits of his material, the
limits of the formal structures of his work--and the fibres of those
structures will no doubt evince some sort of native quality, assuming
him to be a significant writer. As to the spores--the case of Joyce
claiming he never read Chekhov is interesting . . . who among us knows
what air he breathes? We're more aware of this, I think, in the
sciences, than in the arts . . . two scientists, say, working in
isolation, thousands of miles apart, simultaneously reaching a major
new conclusion. Now, I'm not so reactionary as to claim that isolation
is essential to research and that communication between scientists
should be discouraged--but the scientist, like the writer, must work
within the term of his immediacies, must call a temporary halt to the
acquisition of broad knowledge in order to formulate a use of
knowledge; then, the recognition of world conjunctions is something
that comes naturally. An interesting example of this is Ezra Pound, who
consciously and obviously courted world influences, world cultures. But
these cultures were his immediacies--and in the way he chose them, and
handled them--if nothing else, in his speech rhythms--he is oddly a
prairie man.
We are all aware of the terrible damage
exerted by fame (flying the Atlantic was easy for Lindbergh, it was the
crowds at Le Bourget that almost wouldn't let him land--they were the
danger). The American writer goes on the lecture circuit, radio &
TV talk shows, etc., etc., he travels and travels and travels--and his
subsequent work, whatever the value of the work that produced the
fame--the subsequent work is usually weak and amorphous. It is just
those immediacies that have been violated.
I: Let me
quote from Emerson, another 19th century figure, and see what bearing
these lines from "History" have to your work: 1) "All history becomes
subjective; in other words there is no history, only biography." 2)
"There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest
us--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe--the roots of all
things are in man." 3) "In like manner all public facts are to be
individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once
History becomes Fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime." 4) "If
the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from
individual experience." I'll ask a few things and you can take what you
want. First, you have described the movement in your work from
fictional mask to biography (the diary and letters in Patagoni). This
seems to me to be what Emerson is talking about: history is biography
because the mind contains everything, the past and present, the
individual and the collective experience. Isn't this what Michael Mills
works with: that not only are there correspondences to find, but that
he contains all of history within himself?
Second, is Emerson one more figure from the previous century who has created a tradition to which you belong?
PM:
Having been brought up in Cambridge, in a household frequently overrun
with academic types--a household imbued with the darker and more
troubled soul of Melville--having visited often in Concord, canoed and
hunted turtles, as a youngster, in the Concord River--and having, in my
teens, suddenly "discovered" Emerson, and, riding that transcendental
high, concluded that the world had just that moment been invented--
granted all this, it is not surprising that my attitude toward Emerson,
today, is peculiar.
In so much of Emerson--the
pieces you have quoted above, for example--there is nothing that one
can argue with . . . and I guess that's the substance of my quarrel
with him: a man who can't be argued with is operating on one plane
alone, in Emerson's case, a sunny plane--and who argues with the sun? I
am reminded of Olson's remark about the Mayans, the appeal to him of
their culture, their ways of thinking and doing: "the ball still
snarled"; and also of this thought from Poe (who hated the
transcendentalists with a life-long passion): "It is the excess of the
suggested meaning--it is the rendering this the upper instead of the
under-current of the theme--which turns into prose (and that of the
very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the so-called
transcendentalists."
Meaning, properly, is deeply
encrusted, embedded, often hedged in with contradictions of itself, or
at least paradoxes, ambiguities. In Emerson, it is all too clear. I
suppose this is why Emerson is a favorite in American lit classes: the
strain of the students' search for "meaning" is minimized. Taking your
last question first, sure, Emerson not only defines a tradition in
which I and others of my generation belong--he could almost be said to
render our efforts superfluous! I mean, if you got the meaning, why
bother with all that trudging in the brambles?
Sure,
I agree with Emerson, and your interpretation of Genoa and Patagoni in
terms of his ideas- the intercourse between history and biography, the
objective and the subjective--it's just that I miss the trudge, the
brambles.
Maybe I'm a cranky Yankee, but today is a
grim, drizzly December day, and I somehow don't mind it, I feel no need
to "transcend" it, prefer it, in fact, to a land where the skies are
not cloudy all day.
I: Could you explain, though I
know you've discussed this elsewhere, the influence that Ron Hubbard
had upon Genoa? It seems to me that his theory of dianetics is a
psychological, perhaps physiological, description of what Emerson is
talking about.
PM: I recently got a letter from a
man who laid out a detailed Jungian interpretation of Will West, and
who wanted to know if that was my plan when I wrote the book. I wrote
back that if such a plan satisfied him, helped him to interpret the
book, he was welcome to it, but that no such idea was in my mind when I
wrote it. I have never been concerned with psychological or psycho
historical plans or interpretations, as such. The nearest I have come
to this has been the use of dianetics, in Genoa, which is very specific
and pragmatic. Hubbard postulated memory as a "time track," from
conception to the present, from which all events would theoretically be
recoverable. I lifted this notion and applied it to Western
civilization, or American history, conception to the present. This may
sound like Jung's collective unconscious, but it is much more a
mechanical device than a philosophical concept. Hubbard also postulated
the engram, or physiological memory, wherein physical trauma is
recorded and remembered in the cells affected, such memory being prime
and powerful by comparison with memory in the brain cells. This
introduced a whole physiological concept of memory and history--and of
a term that might embrace these two: evolution. (Have you ever wondered
why there are so many 7-foot basketball players nowadays? When I was a
child, such men would be found only in the circus--they were extremely
rare. Now they are common. What happened? Has the need for tall
basketball players suddenly affected the gene pool of the race?) A
man's body--Michael or Carl Mills--brain and physique
together--embodies his physical, historical, cultural inheritance.
Hence the emphasis I have placed on various physiological anomalies in
the two brothers.
I: In the course of the evening
that Michael Mills spends in his attic remembering his own past, as
well as that of Melville and Columbus, it seems to me that a certain
irony emerges; namely, Michael Mills is not Melville or Columbus, and
that their heroic proportions are not his. After all, there is a kind
of grimness to his life, a kind of mediocrity, a certain disparity
between the fact and the thought (e.g., his "ship" has a nagging wife
in its hull who, along with other things in the novel, keeps reminding
the reader of this disparity). What I am suggesting is that, like
Joyce, you are not simply rewriting an epic. One can spend a lifetime
tracking down all the correspondences between Joyce's Ulysses and
Homer's Odyssey, and yet there is a very basic difference between Bloom
and Ulysses. You could have made Michael Mills heroic, but you didn't,
and yet you have all these parallels between his experience and that of
Melville and Columbus.
PM: With this question you
are into a very interesting level of historical perspective, historical
evolution. You may have pinpointed Joyce's major contribution here: the
fact that Bloom must be Bloom, warts and all--he cannot be Ulysses.
It's
a difficult subject to approach, because part of me--and, I think, an
even larger part of Olson- wanted to believe that the old epic approach
is still viable--but a larger part knows that it isn't. And yet, at the
same time, we reject the celebration of self-pity, or immobility, or
mediocrity, for its own sake. So Michael Mills must be Michael Mills,
but if he becomes interesting, it is only in terms of everything else
he envisions. Scylla and Charybdis, if you wish--and I'm trying to
steer a course between them.
A negative look at this
can be had through the work of those contemporaries who believe or
pretend that the old-fashioned epic is not dead. A good example would
be The Donner Party, by George Kiethly. Certainly an heroic
subject--but he is unable to bring formal life to it, he bores us
instead with endless, dreary triplets--prose, flat prose, lazily cast
in verse. He is negative proof that form is only vital when it is
contemporary.
Needless to say, both Melville and
Columbus--like Michael Mills--were endowed with nagging impediments. To
Melville, Lizzie and the kids, if only in terms of their dollar demands
on him, must have represented something like this. And Columbus
returned from the third voyage in chains. But it's a question of
emphasis, of which facet of the prism shines the strongest. Some
historical wheel has turned, the traditional epic approach has gone
hollow, irony must enter the presentation of the heroic--and Joyce was
perhaps the first to demonstrate this.
(It is the
collapse of just this heroic approach that renders the third volume of
Maximus so searingly sad . . . Olson, to me, is the last of the great
epic poets--or 19th-century romantics.)
All of
this--the historical change, the turn of the wheel--has something to
do, I think, with ours being a spectator's rather than a participant's
culture: radio, television, sporting-watching, the innumerable highs of
drugs, TM, yoga, etc.--the image that I used earlier, in talking of
Michael Mills: everything is projected on a screen, and we trip, and
watch.
That removed, contemplative, observer's spot,
that used to be the unique retreat of the artist and the poet, is now
the most democratic locale: it is inhabited by everyone.
Not
that the mechanic or the pump jockey is the modern hero--although,
perhaps he is. But the hero is the do-er, he is the man of action.
I:
I want to return to what you were saying earlier about removing the
persona and placing yourself directly into the text. I have been
reading an essay by Olson, published in 1951, in which he says that
there are two possible directions for the novel. The first he calls the
"DOCUMENT," in which the author "juxtaposes, correlates, and causes to
interact" his materials; the author here is very remote from his work.
The second he calls "NARRATOR IN"- the opposite of the first--in which
the author directly and in "his own person" focuses upon himself. It
seems to me that both of these together describe the movement in your
work.
PM: My first novel, which antedated Will West,
was conventional; it was not published and it was not good. I wouldn't
want anyone to see it now. It was just a straight, conventional novel
as far as form was concerned. Will West was the first one where I
started to do funny things- introduce documentary material,
ethnological material, archeological material, all juxtaposed in the
flow of what was still essentially a conventional novel. Then the novel
form breaks down further as we get into Genoa, although I am still
hanging the structure on the framework of these two fictional or
quasi-fictional brothers. But by the time of Patagoni I am into what
Olson is talking about, where I am the persona to the extent that there
is a persona. I am the person in the journal section at the end. In the
early part of that book I was dealing with straight documentary
material. I've now got an unpublished recent work in which I go back to
the method I use in the last section of Patagoni where I am present as
a sort of journalist.
I: Why are the letters and diary entries unedited?
PM:
As I have said earlier in this interview, I tend to view my own work as
process. I think, at the time of writing, I was anxious that the book
should itself embody some process, some change within its
structure--perhaps because I was now foregoing for the first time the
processes accessible in the conventional novel. The book represents two
levels of experience: that of the scholar, accumulating and organizing
his material, and that of one's unprepared, non-literary diurnal
doings. The historical material on the Indians and Ford belongs on the
first level; the stock car race, the trip to Detroit, and the diary and
letters, on the second. The process of writing the book was, first,
scholarship (controlled), and then action (spontaneous); the most
active parts (where the author is most active) are the trip to Detroit
(where I try to pick up the flow by doing funny things with
punctuation), and the diary and letters, whose spontaneity, I felt,
would be absolutely violated by any sort of editing.
I:
Since each of your books tends to be different from the others, and
given what you have just said about Patagoni, I wonder whether you set
certain technical problems for yourself that you then must solve?
PM:
I am aware of technical challenges. Trying to do something I've never
done before, or trying to do something in a way that I've never done it
before. That's always a very exciting part in the conception of the
book, when I am trying to figure out the pattern of the material. It's
all part of the ferment and enthusiasm that come along in generating a
new work. I don't do anything quite as cold-blooded as sitting down and
setting a technical problem for myself. I follow the precept that form
follows content and that ideally they should be inseparable. And I like
to think that in this conception period that the two work very closely
together. If a thing seems to be falling into a familiar pattern in
term of technique, I'm not bothered. I don't get nervous about not
inventing some challenge for myself. I remember in Apalache, that
chapter where I have the two accounts- one of Denmark Vesey and the
modern one of Robert Williams--in the manuscript I ran a plain black
line down the middle of the page which, in the printed version was not
necessary. I did that in order to physically juxtapose those two
stories. This gets back to another thing--giving the reader a challenge
or deliberately upsetting him. I am delighted with that notion because
it gives the reader an option. He can do one of two things: he can
either try to read a whole page and carry the two stories in his head
or he can take one and go all the way through and then go back to the
other.
I: Do you get discouraged by the fact that you have only a small reading audience?
PM:
I've been very fortunate both by circumstances and by something in my
own nature which have saved me from that very kind of depression that I
see afflicting a number of my friends. Several factors are involved
here. First of all, I made up my mind when I was nineteen that I was
going to be a writer, though I had then planned to be a playwright. I
started off as an actor. I was brought up in an atmosphere which was
very sympathetic to the idea that serious creative endeavor was not
always financially successful. I didn't have to fight that battle that
so many people have to--You're going to be a writer, fine, where's your
first pay check? I had that support to begin with, which I think was
probably very important. Secondly, I made up my mind very early that I
was not going to try to make my living as a writer; I wasn't going to
key the writing to the pay check. I decided that what I was going to do
to support myself and my family would be totally remote from literary
work. I would have a complete separation. I have always been
sympathetic to people like Williams or Wallace Stevens or Charles Ives,
men who somehow kept their business careers separate from what they
were doing as writers or composers. I don't necessarily say that that's
something everybody should do. But that decision worked very well for
me. I did not expect to make a lot of money from writing, and I was not
going to drain my literary energies just to produce an income. It was
only nine or ten years ago that I achieved some measure of financial
independence. I did all sorts of crazy things for a living, mostly in
selling. I was a pretty good salesman for some reason or other. The
last most successful thing I did was to operate my own real estate
brokerage, which was a lot of fun and made a lot of money. I finally
gave it up about ten years ago, and for the last ten years I've been
able to consider myself a fulltime writer. So, by those decisions and
by the way my life pattern has worked out, I've escaped that very kind
of depression.
I: But aside from the economic considerations?
PM:
It's hard for me to remember how I felt about that down through the
years in terms of a sense of recognition. Now that I've gotten a little
taste of it --I'm asked to give college readings and once in a while
someone will review a book somewhere--, I get a little bit more
intrigued and hungry for that when I never expected any of it and never
got any of it. I've been fortunate that, for whatever reasons, I've
been able to be fatalistic or even cheerful about fame or the lack of
it.
I: Well, Melville's the great example.
PM: Mr. Melville's the obvious one. He never had it except at the beginning and it was all downhill from there.
I:
And Williams of course was not published by a major New York house
until he was about sixty. He had to finance his early books himself.
PM:
It was a credit to my mother and father who, though they didn't like
the books, paid for the publication of Will West and Genoa. They were
particularly irritated by Genoa. They did not like the book. They
thought it did a disservice to the memory of Melville. But they paid
for the publication. I tend to be close to Dr. Williams' idea that
writing is a disease. If you can get along without it, you're really
much better off. I have a hard time getting this across to other
writers. When I finish a major work, I say, Thank God that's done, I
don't ever want to have an idea again. I don't want to go through this
ordeal again.
L - R, Wonder Dave, Matthew Rucker (interviewer and slammer himself, at www.soap - boxing.com), Heather (??), Lorena Duarte, and interviewer Lynette Reini-Grandell)
I'm very happy because my good friend and daring performance artist and poet Gabrielle Civil is back in the States after a much deserved year-long sabbatical from her job at the College of St. Catherine. 
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of hosting some of the finalists in Quest for the Voice, a Minnesota youth slam team. They are sponsored by the Minnesota Spoken Word Association and Sha Cage and e.g. bailey were there to hear their words. Right now they're trying to raise $10,000 to take the team to San Jose for an international competition--contact them at MNSWA to make a donation! 
