by A. D. Mira
MS: Which part of your career do you like best: Teaching, writing, or public relations?
TCB: I'm really committed to teaching. I always thought of myself as a teacher. I've always done it and I've always enjoyed it. Obviously, when I first began, I needed to teach for the income. Now, it is nice to be paid, but I really don't need it, so I could quit at any time. but I don't want to and I hope to continue for a long while. It excites me to be a part of this incredible pool of talent that I find. The gift for writing is enormous now, whether it'll be exercised by my students or not I don't know, but the gift is there and it's extraordinary. It really energizes me and I think I help in a social function, too. My social function is that I help to teach the next generation of writers and readers coming, and try to inspire them and stand as an example for them, so that they can look at me and say "Well, when this schmuck can do it, so can I." (laughs) But of course. the writing is the center of my life. It's the only thing I wanted to do since 1 discovered it when I was maybe about nineteen or so. When I first began writing I was very attracted to the idea of being famous and to settling old scores and to show everybody that I was worthwhile and okay. A lot of authors have this as a motivating factor, and I do, of course, really love being in front of an audience and performing and going out before the public, but I think in all of my career in writing just the act of doing it becomes more and more significant. I never thought that this would he the case, but it is for the reasons I told you a lew minutes ago. It's just enormously gratifying to tell new stories that are in my head. In between the new novel that I'm working on now and the finishing of The Tortilla Curtain, I wrote a few stories which you may have seen in The New Yorker in the last year or in Playboy and so on. It was just somehow in writing those stories that it just amazed me that not a year, only a month goes by and I have a finished product. Something that I like, that I think is good. An expression or something that disturbs me or something that I want to make fun of, here it is. and it wasn't there before and only I of all the six billion people on earth could have written that particular story, whether it's good or bad. And I just want to see how many more stories there are. It's just that it's a fascinating thing. Especially since I don't belong to any party, I don't have any political axe to grind. I'm not going to write one to three novels of the workers triumphing. I just want to see what comes next. It is as amazing to me as I guess it is to the public, and I want to keep trying to do something different and challenge myself all the time to see if I can do something different. To the people who say, "How can he presume to write from a Mexican point of view, a Mexican female point of view," I say that it's my duty to try to do that. How else should I understand everybody. Every good novelist should be able to inhabit anybody of any ethnic group, either sex, any age, old, young. That's what your job is, you're supposed to project yourself into somebody else and create something out of that.
MS: Would you like to teach somewhere else or are you now a devoted Californian?
TCB: I will never teach anywhere else. I will be staying in California at the University of Southern California. It's the only teaching job I've ever had, besides from a semester at the University of Iowa in '88, where I went back when I was fond of going to my alma mater and teach there and see the town again. I could do that occasionally. but that's it. I want to teach there [at USC-LA]. And I'm a West Coast boy now. "The West is the best." as Jim Morrison said. He was right.
Questions and Answers
(The audience of a public reading asking TCB.)
TCB: So. this is your chance. I won't be back until 1998 (laughing in the audience).
Question: Have you ever tried farming hemp? (laughing in the audience)
TCB: This gentleman is referring to my book Grün ist die Hoffnung, which in English is called Budding Prospects, and is about a pot plantation in Northern California which was a resounding failure. It is a true story to which I had very close access (laughing in the audience, clapping). Had the plantation succeeded and all the participants become millionaires as they had planned, I wouldn't have bothered to write the book, but it was such a failure. It makes for a great comedy, I thought, anyway.
Q: How do you pronounce your middle name? (laughing in the audience)
TCB: [Ko-rä-ge-son] , although I was in England last year and I met a bunch of real Irish men from Ireland, and they said it should be called [Ko-ra-he-sän] , but hey, who is to argue with me? I mean, it's my name (laughing in the audience). I stick to [Ko-rä-ge-son].
Q: Why, do you think, is it that you are so popular in Germany?
TCB: I just can say that aside from the US, I'm most popular in Germany, more than in any other English-speaking country. It is great. I think the reason is that the German people are extremely perceptive (laughing in the audience).
Q: Do you have anything to do with Frank Zappa, because his music is like your writing?
TCB: Well. there are a lot of legends going around about me, almost 100% of them are false. The only thing I have in common with the late Frank Zappa is that we both looked weird and we both were very skinny. (laughing in the audience)
Q: The car accident from your new book. Is that a true story as well or did you make it all up in your mind?
TCB: No it's not. This is entirely invented. You might know that when I write a story of any kind, including the one I just read to you, or a novel and so on, even the complex ones like World's End or Water Music, I don't have a plan, I don't have a program, I just do some research for a while and then I begin writing. A voice occurs to me, some characters and then it's like solving a puzzle, putting all the pieces together in the end. So, I just made it up. It is fiction after all.
Q: Are you really fond of fat women?
TCB: Like Fatima, of course, from Water Music? I have to admit that I am. Because, you know, what could be more opposite from me (laughing in the audience)? Of course, I tried some other varieties of women, too, though (laughing in the audience).
Q: What do you think about John Steinbeck?
TCB: This question is in regard of this book, I'm sure you're aware. I use a quote from The Grapes of Wrath to start this book and the quote is: "They are animals. How could anyone live like this and not be an animal?" You know, of course. John Steinbeck was referring to the Okies in the dustbowl era, people from the middle of the country of the US who came under the pressure that they were starving to California. the promised land. And at that time, of course. as you know, there were police stations at the border to keep them out. It was an internal migration of American citizens, and now it's the same situation at the southern border for the same reasons, but now we have an influx of citizens from another country, of another ethnic group, with another language. And I wondered how Steinbeck's ethos of 1939 would work in the 90s, where we have the added complication of having about close to six billion people on earth now, and projected to double in 25 years, if you believe the prognosticators. So I wanted to just re-examine Steinbeck's ethos in light of the new realities of today, just to see how it is like. And again, I didn't know where I was going with the book when I did start.
Q: Why do you have all your characters run into a state of misery and bad luck?
TCB: That is a very simple question to answer. Because like, I'm sure, all of you. I feel totally helpless in the face of a cruel, unreasoning and miserable universe. For instance. I read a newspaper article recently about a guy who pulled up to a stop light, up in, let's say, Cleveland or some place, and he heard a little thump and looked around him. and a tiny hit of a meteor this big (shows a circlo of approx. 2 cm), flaming hot, came down through the roof of his car, through the trunk and burned a hole in the road underneath the car. If he were a few inches off, it would have burned a hole in the top of his head (laughing in the audience). You know, we are all subjects to the wings of fate, and so I can't control that, I feel very helpless. I worry about it, are you not? I'm nervous about it. So at least when 1 create the universe, and I am the god of the novel, I re
ally want to make them suffer (laughing in the audience, clapping).
Q: Do you like the stories of John Irving?
TCB: You may know, I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and I studied there with three professors: John Cheever, Vance Bourjaily, who had been John Irving's teacher at the workshop, and then John Irving. So he was my teacher and is a very old friend. So, yes, I do (laughing in the audience).
Q: Is Tortilla Curtain the real name of the border?
TCB: It is a name that is used for the border, as a kind of third way really. You know, I like to think about it like this: If you imagine what formerly was the Iron Curtain and you think about it, you think of this big mass of impermeable fence. Then we applied the same term., in America anyway, to communist China and we called it the Bamboo Curtain. But, you know, bamboo is not impermeable, with the holes in it and you can break it if you want, and now we have the Tortilla Curtain, three strips of barbed wire in a desert with a couple of limp tortillas hanging over it (laughing in the audience). I really like the image, and again, it crops up as a central image of the book, which talks about borders, walls, fences. Where Delaney lives in the suburb, in fact, there is a big movement in the novel to build a wall around it to keep the people out and keep animals out like the coyotes who keep coming. In fact, I should have read you the great chapters in which Delaney's entire two cute, little, flappy, little, tiny, little, cute, little Dandie Dinmont terriers are eaten by a coyote (laughing in the audience), but there was no time tonight.
Q: Do you write on a computer or in the old way on a typewriter?
TCB: Well, we all walked into a generation of technology. John Updike writes in long hand. I began writing as a student on a keyboard and typewriter because my papers were always late and I didn't have the time to do a draft and write it out, so I always composed on a keyboard. I have a computer and I could move over to it if I wanted to, but I still continue to work on a typewriter because there is a lot of voodoo involved in writing (laughing in the audience), I realized about that. In fact, I have an old ritual each morning before I start to write. I select a prime chicken. I shave its feathers on its neck (laughing in the audience), bleed it into a pan, put that pan under the desk and put my feet into it (laughing in the audience) and when the blood sticks cold, I start writing (laughing in the audience, clapping). Okay, thank you very much. You were a great audience, I appreciate this (clapping, stomping, whistling, shouting).
(By Markus Schröder).
Speaking with Jef Tombeur - April 1989
Interviewed at his home in Los Angeles, CA.
Sandye's note: My special thanks to Jef Tombeur for allowing us to share this previously unpublished interview.
Jef Tombeur: Let's speak about your parents... What was the image you had of your parents at the time you wrote your first books and what do you make of it now ?
T. Coraghessan Boyle: I suppose you refer to my teenage years, which would be, as I'm a very young man, about six or seven years ago... My parents were working class people, uneducated, my mother went through high school, my father went up to the eighth grade, he was in an orphanage. He had not much to say to me, but he was always present, he supported me in anything I wanted to do, both of them did. Unfortunately, both died young...
I was 24 when my father died, and probably 32 or so when my mother died.
Like many American teenagers, I was very rebellious and very disdainful of them... And I regret that now.
JT: A few things have been said about them and the story goes that you just broke away from your family.
TCB: Like many American teenagers, I was really rebellious, very disdainful of them. And I regret that now because when you get older you regret this, you see your parents in a different way. I think it's necessary to feel like that in order to get away from the family and get off on your own. But then you come back and have a rapprochement with your parents. I never really got to do that...Because they died. I'd love to be able to know them and talk to them today. But that's impossible. My father was a very morose and silent man...
JT:Your mother was, in a way, the real head of the family?
TCB: Yes. I have a sister, three and a half years younger than I. She lives in Arizona, in my mother's house. My mother retired to Arizona with her second husband. She pretty much ran the household, no doubt about it. And that's maybe why I run this household, as you can see, in such a way as buying groceries and cooking and whatnot, and every detail I oversee. Except, maybe, of course, the shopping, the incredible shopping for every ridiculous article in the world that Karen perpetuates all the time. And I don't have any patience for it. But I mean, all the essential things here, I control. And that's maybe the response to my mother controlling it.
JT: And your father was rather absent?
TCB: Well, let's put it this way. He had a tremendous alcohol problem. He was a very pleasant, amenable, sweet guy. My mother used to say that his personality was like mine, prior to the war. But that the war changed him. And made him very morose. He was part of the Normandy invasion and he was one of the first to land and he also served a very long time on the battlefront and saw horrible things in it. She said it changed [him]. It changed his personality. Each day he drank... a lot. But he still went to work each day. He was never aggressive or mean or loud; he was just sort of sad. He was disturbed in some way... about life. I consider his death as in some way a sort of suicide. He drank himself to death. Consciously and purposely. At the age of 54.
JT: And what about your mother?
TCB: My mother died also of alcoholism. Or complications. She had many things wrong but she died of liver failure as a result of drinking at the age of 57.
JT: This could make a very sad environment for a young boy... But I suppose you've had as well some kind of happy boyhood.
TCB: There was a period when my father stopped drinking during my teenage years for maybe six or seven years and he became happier. He was in good spirits.
JT: Some have depicted you as being really poor at that time. Was it really true or was it just that compared to the kid next door you were considered rather poor?
TCB: Well, in America, as you know, nearly everyone considers himself to be middle class. Everyone. And so I guess I considered myself to be middle class. Looking back on it, it was not necessarily the case. I never was in need of anything. My parents denied themselves things to provide me with everything, within bounds, of course, and make me feel the equal of anyone. And encourage me to do whatever I liked. And for that, I'm eternally grateful to them. I grew up in a wealthy community and most of my friends are very wealthy.
JT: So you really didn't realize where you were standing in a way...
TCB: I think it was good to be like that. Because, in a way, I still discovered I had something to prove to myself, to prove that I could accomplish something, maybe. Some of my friends don't really push themselves too hard. They are comfortable. It's some part of it. I think I had to prove something. And also discovering that... You know, when an artist discovers that he can do something well in art, and enjoy the process of doing it, it's a gift, it's something given to you. To be able to make the discovery that you have the gift and pursue it is tremendously rewarding in itself. I think that combines with perhaps the drive to prove oneself, to be in the world, the need to be famous, recognized, loved, those two combine with a kind of perseverance that is needed to continue to work as an artist besides setbacks. These two make some kind of happy combination.
JT: But today it's there. You're recognized as a writer...
TCB: Ah, it gets beyond that. I think these are the initial impulses for doing it, you know, wanting to be famous and so on. I think then, when you're more mature, more in interaction with the art itself, you've got more interest in the art itself, it's not necessarily being famous or being more recognized that such or such other writer or musician, or whatever. You become more interested in making a great work of art. Or hoping that you will or thinking that the next one will b
e a great work of art. And seeing. You begin to see ahead of you. Years. I see years ahead of what I'm going to do. I have my projects map. I amaze my editors, I can tell them what I'll doing three years from now and when I'll be delivering the manuscript. And, unlike most writers, I do. I deliver the manuscript. It's a self imposed deadline, I mean, there's no deadline imposed upon me by my publishers...