by A. D. Mira
JT: This is also the case for short stories collections?
TCB: When I write some short stories, I don't think they will make a full book. I'm going to write another novel about the Hudson, a story that occurred to me while I was writing the last one, World's End.
JT: You want to be the "historical memory writer" about the Hudson?
TCB: Well, certainly that fascinates me. This is an incident from history that I read about while doing the research for World's End. I realized that it didn't belong in that book, it needed a book by itself. And I'm pretty sure that's what I'll do next. I have another novel, as well, but I think I want to do this one next. I like to change cases. I like to do something different each time. After the three years of World's End, I had a lot of contemporary stories stored up in me that I was unable to do. And so the stories in If the River was Whisky are more like Descent of Man stories. Typical contemporary stories.
JT: Did you develop early a kind of jester attitude in order to feel more acceptable by others or was it because you had fears to express yourself to the full straight away?
TCB: My way of relating to the world through absurdity and humour always has been and nothing is calculated. The dedicatees of Water Music, the Raconteurs' Club is a group that I invented to put over seven of my life best friends. We all tell each other stories and we all have a very sardonic, lax sense of humor. Some of the people in the Raconteurs' Club I have known since I was three years old and they are still my best friends... or Pablo Campos who's my photographer now, who has done photographs for several books, and Alan Arkawy, who was in Washington with me last week. I had asked him, "Allan, have you been in Washington lately?" -- and he came, along with my friend Griff Stevens, who was a rock 'n' roll star, the three of us went, and it was almost like the Marx Brothers. Just a flow of wit. It's just fun. Just fun to be witty and to look at things maybe with a sort of a jaunty style, but it's the way I relate to the world. It's true humor and, especially, a sardonic humor. I think that it can be, as many people have said, that satire and humor can be a mask for hiding your deeper feelings and that's maybe true. To an extent. But I think in some of my more mature works and stories and in World's End, I found an happy medium between that sort of absurd sense of humor and also a desire to say real and true things about life in the world and very serious things. I don't make a distinction between comic literature and serious literature. I think that comic literature is very serious, deadly serious at its best. I make a distinction between, let's say, a comic piece that I'll write and a non-comic piece. I recall, hum... You're familiar with Greasy Lake. I'll call something like, er, All Shook up, better yet, Not a Leg to Stand on, a non-comic piece. And I like to work in both modes. When you read If the River Was Whisky, they're sixteen stories, all of which I've written, with the exception of one, since I've finished World's End, and they appeared in about eighteen months, and then I began East is East, on which I'm working at now. You find that four out these sixteen stories are in the non-comic mode, including the title story. One of the problems that the critics have had with me in the United States is that I'm not part of a, of any group... at all, you know. And I think that's good. I don't want to be exclusively a comic writer, although that is my major mode and at what I feel most comfortable, but if I feel that I want to write a moving, non-comic story in a traditional mode, I don't feel that I should be excluded from it.
JT: Well, Pynchon, for one, has done that... He has written both comic and non-comic novels.
TCB: Yeah, exactly. I want to be in that mode, just as Pynchon, Garcia Marquez, all of these have the same fundamentals as I make, which is to give you a reality slightly skewed, but to make very earnest points in a large way about the world. And that, I guess, is the tradition to which I come to. You know, history fascinates me. To imagine Manhattan wired to the European invasion is one of the impetuses that drove me to write World's End. Just to imagine it, in a pristine state, in a savage state, with the American Indians. Well, they lived in the Hudson Valley for seven thousand years in harmony with the environment. I'm not trying, indeed, to romanticize, of course, I know they ate one another and they peeled the skin from one another and all that. But, you know, here we are, a species that is overpopulating and decimating each other. We are five billion of us, we are too successful, we are going to destroy the whole planet. And we have certainly destroyed and polluted Manhattan and the Hudson River and everything else in my time. And I'd like to write about the Industrial Revolution and you can see this in World's End, too. In fact, this new book about the Hudson will be exclusively about the Industrial Revolution. But to think about the Algonquins living for seven thousand years, eating oysters from the Hudson River and being like animal species themselves, that didn't become too successful and overpopulated and lived between the bounds of the environment, that fascinates me. And that was one of the motivating facts just to write World's End.
JT: Would you say your humor is, as well, self-deprecatory or just a way to convey the self-delusion that people experience when they've tried to change the world and didn't change it much or got the wrong results? I mean, most of your characters are mostly making fools of themselves...
TCB: Hmmm, I think that they are objects of satire, definitely. No doubt about that. Well, I have done a shorter book of stories and then a shorter novel, and that is the phase I'm in now, East is East will probably be about the size of Budding Prospects, it's a contemporary book, set in the state of Georgia, about a Japanese man that jumps ship and is at large there. And, in a comic way, he's a loveable character, engaging himself in some sort of criminal activities, but in a very funny way. It's well under way. It should be out in the Fall of 1990. Next year.
JT: How do you usually depict yourself in your novels or short stories? Will you be in this one? For example, Tom Crane in World’s End is rather close to you...
TCB: Well, I don't appear in any of them. Except from Descent of Man in the story Drowning. There's a character very much like me. Oh, I was in also... I was in Dada, I was in that story about Idi Amin [a former ruler of Uganda]. I was also in I Dated Jane Austen. But I don't appear in my stories. Tom Crane is very much based on a friend of mine. But, yes, he's like me too to some extent. But he's closely modelled on a good friend. Walter van Brunt, physically, he's not like me. This is something I took from Washington Irving, a lot of the Dutch I took from Washington Irving. The Dutch translator said so many of the Dutch are OK and I said, "I know." I took it from Washington Irving purposely-- it's a joke. Van Brunt is the character from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow who takes Ichabod Crane's girl from him. And, in fact, the only way to read the story is that Van Brunt, Brom Bones, terrifies Ichabod by throwing a pumpkin on the road and pretending to... You can read as a supernatural story, but I think Irving puts... has this code at the end to let you know that, in fact, Brom Bones had assailed Ichabod Crane late at night. A large part of World's End derives from the inspiration of Washington Irving. So Brom Bones is this very powerful, physical guy. I relate more to Ichabod Crane, who, in this hilarious story, is the object of satire, this total skinny guy with a big nose who never stops talking... You know, he's a schoolmaster, he loves the ladies, he's a dancer, he's just charming everyone... And I think I put some part of me in all the characters. In Walter Van Brunt, maybe not. Physically. But, maybe, I'm not quite as stupid as Walter Van Brunt. But his fascination about the existentialists, with Camus, with Sartre, with Camus' Meursault, this is all me, this is all that was current when I was in college. You were asking me the other night what French authors that I admire... Well, I began writing at seventeen, I was in college, they're teaching existentialism in the classroom, and it probably darkened my view of human life forever, irreversibly, you know... as it is with Walter. But Walter is a very limited character mentally, he's more buffeted by life, as his father says, "it's in the blood, it's in the bones, you have no choice... You have no choice but to be like this." And I think that's true, that's true to a large extent...
JT: But now you've got children. They've got their personalities, but they can change, evolve...
TCB: I think it goes beyond that. Anyway--you and I are sitting here today as the end products of all of evolution to this point. And so is this squirrel. I'm not saying something very significant about Man, the squirrel here is also the end product of all evolution--to this point, to this moment. If your parents had not reproduced, you wouldn't be here. With that comes all the various gifts that you are given and, maybe, also some problems, personality problems, problems with physical addictions, etc. And I think that, yes, World's End is a very bleak book. The critics in America loved the book, but they said how bleak it is. And I wish I had a better news for them, I wish I had a better message. And maybe I will. But this is how I felt when I wrote the book and I do believe it. You can't escape your destiny and there's no free will, you are an animal, you know. And it is probably my theme since the beginning, from Descent of Man where I'm so fascinated with science and evolution. It's not a happy view. I mean, I wish I could believe in things beyond what I see. But I can't. This is what Walter says. He... he's studied too much science, too much geology to believe in anything else and maybe that's bad. On the other hand, I very much believe in tradition. And regret that in America, we, you know, we're a mobile society, we have so little tradition. A lot of my L. A. stories are about that, that we have no traditions, that we are artificial and superficial.
JT: What about the female characters ? They are usually positive or, at least, not mischievous, with the noticeable exception of Wendy in Caviar, and Mardi in World’s End. These two both reject the not-so-well-to-do male character who thrives for some kind of stereotype of a flashy girl.
TCB: I find Mary and Mardi total opposites. Mary is the wife in Caviar. Oh, no, you mean Wendy ? Yes, she and Mardi are very close. Last year, in May, when I won the Pen-Faulkner and I was in Washington D.C., I did a one hour live radio show with call-ins. People listening and calling. It’s called The Diane Rehm Show. It’s pretty popular in Washington, but I didn’t know about it and I was a little weary; who’s going to call up for an hour to talk to me ? I was very surprised. A lot of people called up. Some were very frivolous, they just wanted to tell us that they were just listening. Three blind people calling, for instance, just telling us they were blind and listening. But a lot of people who knew my work called up and asked me all sorts of bizarre questions. And raising the issue of women. One person accused me of having been unsympathetic to women and women's liberation and so on in my early work. And, I had to admit, that might have been true, you know. I also admitted that, indeed, I am a man, that can’t be redone, and maybe I did have some prejudices and some problems. I think that my women characters are possibly better rounded now. I’m speaking specifically of a character in East in East, it has a female heroine. She is the star of the book, this female. But, Mary and Mardi are types, no? Wendy, the other girl, that I know very well and… if it’s not flattering, so what, what can I do? I can’t please everyone, especially as a satirist. In East is East, Ruth Dershowitz, she’s like, most like in literature, Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair [a book by William Makepeace Thackeray], she’s very skinny, very, very skinny. But, hmmm, I’m not supposed to please everyone across the board, I just give my own perception of things.
JT: Let’s put it this way: before meeting your wife Karen, did you have to suffer from this type of woman?
TCB: No. I’ve never spoken to even or looked at another woman but my wife (laughs). Only kidding. No, I’ve never suffered from that type of woman, but I was always suspicious of women. And thought that I might suffer. If you’re in love with someone, it is in some way a power trip, isn’t it ? It’s like establishing any relationship, only it’s like the supernova of relationships. Like an explosion of a relationship, to be in love with someone. They might win, they might catch you off, you know, so I was afraid of that and suspicious of that. And suspicious of women who might get the better of me, exactly… And so I found myself a very sweet woman and before her I had found others who were very sweet, too, and no, I never had a bad experience, as you’ve had maybe, but I tried to protect myself against it. Just as I didn’t give a quarter to that guy this morning, and you did. [Note: it was a young beggar bumming around a grocery store on Ventura Boulevard, L.A. who happened to come our way.] I’ve seen it, guys exactly like this, a million times.
JT: Some of your friends say that you just pick up some of their doings and behaviors and fuel your books and stories with them. To what extent is that true?
TCB: I don't think my friends feel used. We talked earlier of the character who became Vogelsang in Budding Prospects. With Vogelsang, it was the first time, in that book, Budding Prospects, everything in it is essentially true. You know, when one of the people chases the bear on his moped, what will he do with the bear when it's caught ? He was not thinking clearly because he was a junkie. All of it is basically true. And the characters are amalgams of the true characters. With one exception. It's Vogelsang--which is an assumed name for a person who's one of my best friends today. And who likes this portrait of himself, even though he's the villain of the book, because he views himself as a bandit, as a bad guy. He loves it. That was the first time I had done that. The other character I could think of is the kind of naïve narrator of Descent of Man, Mr. Horn... It has a lot of me in it. It's the naïf goes against the hard grain of the world and learns a lesson. To that extent, there's a lot of me in some of the narrators of my stories. In Caviar, you know, that narrator, even though he's not an educated or sophisticated man in any way, he's still someone who's a very natural man confronting a harsh and duplicitous reality of our society. In there, I am. As far as my friends are concerned, I began to use them more. Two Ships is a story from Greasy Lake very close to me, about a close friend of mine, like... He would have been in the Raconteurs' Club, and mentioned, except that at the age of seventeen, he went off, he's been in the mental hospital, he was mad. And I've seen him recently in a wonderful way. But anyway, I quote him note for note, exactly, precisely.
And now I'll tell you a wonderful story: why Walter has lost his feet in World's End in two separate accidents. This is based on a story I've heard. There was a guy who grew up in my neighborhood and we lived in a suburb in New York, in a tract house. It was the baby boom, we're talking mid-fifties, late fifties, everyone has kids and all the kids play together all the time. All we did was play sports, my entire boyhood, so I did, play sports, day and night, that's it. Period. Nothing else. No reading, nothing. No girls, nothing. Just sports. Anyhow, this guy used to play sports with us, as a neighbourhood kid, and then moved away when he was about fourteen or so and I never saw him again. When we were all about nineteen, someone said — and I'll just give you his initial: "Did you hear about B.?" He was driving his Harley Davidson, he had an accident, he went down and his right foot was severed. I said, "How terrible!" When we were all about thirty, someone said, "Hey, did you hear about B.? He went down on his left foot and ripped it off!" And, true enough, so he did. So that gave me an image for Walter Van Brunt, he's a man who drifts and he's not attached to the ground, so he's not connected, and so he can suffer the fate that he suffers.
JT: You get also inspired by cooking and fishing...
TCB: Oh yes, there's a graduate student who will do something about food in my stories. It'll be amazing. I'm really fascinated also by aquatic life. I fish. The fish is my totem animal. I love anything to do with fish.
JT: What's your zodiacal sign, by the way?
TCB: Ah, I don't believe in signs. I'm a Sagittarius. And the reason I don't believe in signs, by the way, is because I always assumed that Christ was a Sagittarius and so I was proud to be one. But then I realized he was Capricorn, he was the next one. So... hey, I'll finish the story about the guy with no feet. I'll read you a story that you don't know yet. Which I can read you tonight. It's called Modern Love, it was in Playboy in March of 88. It's about love in the age of infect
ion, the age of AIDS, and it takes it to absurd degrees. And the heroine is a girl obsessed with cleanliness, in an obsessive- compulsive way. She's a very close friend of mine. And I wrote this story about her; in fact, I know her very well. In fact, she was Alan's girlfriend. She was my former student. And Alan is a man I've known since three and a half, my best friend, I've known him all my life. And she's still a good friend, but they don't go together anymore. Guess what? I went to New York last fall--went to New York with Alan-- and I spent five nights in New York. Three in the company of strangers, filmmakers, the Germans, and so on... Two, with Alan and with B., the man with no feet, sitting across to me at the dinner table. Alan, B., another girl and me. Why? Because, through my book, this is true, this as absurd as it may sound, she and B. had gotten together and are now lovers and deeply in love. Incredible, you know. Because of the book and she read the book and she turned him on to the book. I never discussed the book with him--he might feel insulted--I don't know, I didn't want to talk about it with him, but here he was, sitting across the dinner table, this wonderful, charming, delightful, handsome man, wonderful man, and this wonderful woman.
JT: Do you enjoy being with your students? And how does it feel to be taken by them for a congenial genius?
TCB: Hmmm. To be with my students really feeds me in a lot of ways. As you can see, for having spent some time with me, I'm sort of a perennial undergraduate myself. I mean, I've never really grown up, I've always had that sort of attitude of a…being apart from society. Well, here I am, in middle-class suburbia, but, apart from society in some way and different from everybody else, you know. In some way. Maybe it's the old hippie attitude. It's the old sort of outsider attitude. I've always had that. And, I think, it's maybe an immature attitude and, hmmm... So far, I've not taught in college for ten years but, hmmm... I get along very well with the undergraduates. They speak to me in a way that reminds me of where I really am.