IGMS Issue 12

by IGMS

  SCHWEITZER: Maybe he will have an up-and-down career like Kipling. . . . It's interesting to speculate if the people 50 years from now will still be reading you. I am sure every writer speculates about this.

  HALDEMAN: I assume they will be, and I am trying to affect that outcome. I am giving my papers to a university, and I am leaving behind all kinds of things that will let people do cheap master's degrees and have all the source material. I write my books in longhand for the first draft, so there is no question of it actually being a first draft, which gives me a couple of points over all my contemporaries who just write on a computer, because the provenance of something on a computer disk is just your word against someone else's.

  SCHWEITZER: But a writer has to write for the present, not for the hope-for future.

  HALDEMAN: It's a thing I became aware of, actually, mostly when I wrote The Hemingway Hoax and had to go sorting through all those attics of literature and finding writers who leave a big paper trail.

  SCHWEITZER: I am reminded of a story called "The Best-Known Man in the World" by Daniel Pearlman, which is about a would-be poet so obsessed with future scholarship of himself that he leaves this amazing paper trail, carefully files and catalogues his every draft, laundry lists, diaries, and notes, keeping careful records of what he wrote when, and when he had this or that thought for the first time. In time he actually does publish some poetry and become somewhat well-known, but his poetry is seen as only a minor sideline of the man who created this amazing archive. It becomes like the Winchester Mystery House of literature.

  HALDEMAN: I haven't read that. It sounds interesting.

  SCHWEITZER: Any last thoughts? Anything beyond the trilogy?

  HALDEMAN: I have a couple books on the back-burner. I always have. That is never a problem.

  SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Joe.

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