by A. D. Mira
JT: And it is still the same with your friends... I suppose they speak to you in the same way.
TCB: I think that my family was not close. It was not very close and warm, although there was a lot of support and I admire and love them for what they did for me. There was only myself and my sister. My friends are my family. I speak about people I've known since I was three. I have a group of friends. OK, I'll give you another story. I have a man who Chuck and Donna have just visited--they're coming down tonight from visiting him--Rob Jordan. He's one of the Raconteurs' Club. He was my roommate, we've lived together, I've known him all my life. I love him. Absolutely love him without reserve. He's my brother. I can go to him penniless and stay as long as I want. He can come to me. We don't have to make excuses, we don't have to pretend, we just love each other, you know. And I have seven male friends like this, maybe eight or nine now. I mean it grows. People I just love. Hmmm... It's like a family, it's just so very close. Rob Jordan, for instance, when I first moved into this house five years ago and the house was in very rough shape and I'm kind of... you see me running around doing all this work, but it is maintenance, but actual skilful work I can't do. Rob has built houses himself and he's very skilful. He came to visit me. He brought all his tools and he fixed everything in the house, just for the hell of it, and you know what? He also said to me, "I've got an idea for your next novel..." And you know what the idea was? East is East, the novel I'm writing now. He gave me this and the beginning of World's End. I said, "That's a great idea, I'm going to save it." And I'm now using it. That is a friend. He comes and fixes tiles and gives you an idea for your next novel.
JT: But, now, you're also a family man. Are you like this because of Karen or did you really crave for the fulfilment of becoming one, in a sort of sitcom sort of way, as most people of our generation came to think of a family?
TCB: OK, I'll answer this in two ways. First of all, I made fun of the sitcoms in one of my stories, Heart of a Champion, and of the values, the false values, that are imposed upon us by American society and, I suppose, by the civilized world at large. I think one tends to gravitate towards one's opposite. And you tend to get what you need despite The Rolling Stones' lyrics ["I can't get no satisfaction..."]. And Karen has an enormous family. See this house? I've been here ten years in L.A. I would say, without any exaggeration, that ninety percent or more of the time that I have lived in Los Angeles, one of our family members has lived with me. The only reason you [I was invited over for a few days] have that room now is that Kerrie's younger brother is in Arizona for the week. But he'll be back. Christine lived with us for two years; her brother Eric, as well; her father lived with us for two years, in the garage, and then came to Ireland for four months with us, you know. I think it was some kind of happy accident or maybe, you know, on a Freudian level, something much deeper than that. I've met her and now I do have a family, I have children and I have all her brothers and sisters who do have a family...
JT: Is it because you felt deprived of the sense of belonging to a family?
TCB: Not on a conscious level, no. No, I related. I was like a Walter Van Brunt, I was stupid, just a defiant, dope-shooting, heroin-shooting, you know, car-driving maniac, and I just thought that that was the way to be. You know, to be some sort of existential hero.
Now I'm rejecting that attitude. I've seen another face of life. I need all of this, desperately, you know, it's a lonely universe, mankind is lonely. There are frightening things. I used to have a lot of nightmares as an adult and I willed myself not to have them. I used to go to the shrink--they thought I was a very disturbed youth--I used to go to the psychiatrist, went to many of them, and they prescribed Thorazine, you know. Thorazine is a pretty heavy drug. I rejected it finally and heroin and everything else, and tried to make something else which is more traditional and more satisfying for me. I couldn't imagine being like Mitch or like you, maybe even, on my own, trying, bumping around and looking for things. It's hard; it's very, very hard. The older you get, the harder it gets, too. Because the women are jaded, too, and they are all a little crazy. You know, we'll go to the bar and meet these women and they are wonderful, but they've all got their secrets and their idiosyncrasies and they're all very bizarre, and you get more sad anyway. So, hmmm, the bottom line of this is, I became dedicated to my art. I think I grew up at about the age of twenty-five or so. I went to Iowa to escape New York. I was in a very bad drug scene in New York, as you have probably read in these articles. But this all history to me. I went to Iowa because I had only heard of one writing program ever, I didn't even know, I had only heard of one: Iowa. Many of my heroes had gone there, graduated from there, taught there--Robert Coover, John Gardner--and I had had my first story published and I decided that I would apply there. I applied and they accepted me and I went there and I think that's where I began to grow up. I realized I had a gift for an art and that this was what I wanted to do above anything in life. Anything. And maybe having a family and all that is necessary because I don't do my art, and maybe cannot do my art, without some sort of stability from day to day.
Now maybe, also, I've grown up enough that if this family were eliminated, I could be a bachelor and still do my work. So far, my experience has been that I can't do that. I don't know. But, anyway, at twenty-five, this was my protection against the world of drugs and hustling in bars and so on. Because of the art, to make the art, to make a suitable environment to make art, and being committed to it.
JT: Did you feel encouraged to lead some kind of hippie, freewheeling way of life ? I mean, encouraged by your parents, by relatives or friends?
TCB: Oh, yes. Definitely encouraged by the parents. My generation, growing up in my neighborhood, and I grew up in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in America, Kitchawank Colony is a true place. I grew up amongst many Russian Jews who founded an anarchist colony which later became a Communist colony. One of the most liberal communities, certainly, in America. We felt... well, the Civil Rights movement, everything else had preceded that, and we felt very liberal about everything, radical almost. And, at the same time, our parents pampered us; they'd gone through the Depression-- they pampered us and gave us everything, even me, even the working class kid whose father was raised in an orphanage was given anything, any advantage, anything you want. So much so, that I rejected it at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Not even a generation had gone by, but I was already rejecting it. Yes, they made it possible for me to say, "Job? Who needs a job? Fuck a job, I'm gonna be an artist." You know.
JT: What's the story of that ring at your ear?
TCB: Oh, God, I don't know! When I was a hippie, I was so bizarre looking anyway that I didn't need to have an earring, you know. In later years, when short hair came into fashion, I had short hair and I decided, well, maybe I'll have an earring. So I put in an earring. Just for decorative purposes. That's all.
JT: Now, what is World's End all about? A quest for origins, a historical saga, a book about betrayal, a way to come to terms with some personal evolution in your lifestyle?
TCB: I think it's about all of those things. Definitely about all of those things. I think, you know, when you are writing a novel around 500 pages long that takes you three years to write, everything comes in. It if were only some kind of one note song, it would be very boring at that length. I think it has to play a lot of themes, it's like a symphony, it has to play a lot of themes, repeat them, do variations on them and it has to have... just to tell a lot of things, speak of a lot of things. I find that in writing a novel you're locked in for a period of time. I'm the kind of personality that can only do one project at a time. Nothing else can come in between me and the project. I can't write a story when I'm writing a novel and I save all the stories and they just burst out in the period of story writing. Three years is a long time. The most difficult thing is to maintain a consistent talent and an interest in the project over a period of three years. Because, each day, you're bombarded by new things, you meet new people, you
've got new ideas, you change your perspective on things. Hmmm, that's the hard point. But, I think, that maybe, if that is expressed in a book of that magnitude, it's expressed in the themes, in the themes that grow, and there are several of them. Yes, it's about betrayal, certainly. But betrayal is an unexciting theme, a theme that goes from the beginning of literature to today, and will go on for ever, and it is a fact of human existence, but a small theme, you know. I think it is just part of a larger context. And I think the generational thing was very important for me there--the historical perspective of what New York might have been 500 years ago--the setting in three different periods. 1949 was a very important period because it was my parents' time and it was the time of the Peekskill Riots of which we had always heard about because it was sort of a blot on us, you know, a sort of shameful thing that had happened in that area. And then 1969. I originally planned to bring up the book up to 1988. Which would have preceded its publication. Actually, by a year [World's End was actually published in 1987). But, then I realised that it was not what I wanted to do. I wanted Walter to never mature, never to go beyond a sort of physical destiny, an evolutionary destiny...
JT: Maybe because you evolved yourself in these three years...
TCB: Perhaps, if you believe in that kind of Freudian psychology. Perhaps. I believe in this. You know, I was going to the airport with Alan--he was driving me to the airport--and he told me that he was having dreams in which he woke up in a very enclosed environment. He was very safe in there, very warm, and outside, there were these terrible animals. And I said, well, that's the dream of the wolves, of going back to the woods. And Alan pointed out to me, scientist that he is, that it's only appearance. I mean, I take it and, I presume, you do, too, we take things as facts, just as we take evolution as a fact. It just seems so reasonable that it must be, but, in fact, it isn't true, maybe, necessarily. Our age contains the MTV video, our age automatically transmits styles to the most remote corners of the world. I was in Montana years ago and the styles, from New York to Montana, in my age, when I was younger, would have taken ten years to get there. There would have been hippies when anybody else was a punk, you know. That's the way it would have gone. Now, I was in Montana, the teenagers are watching MTV, they are punks too, instantly. And it's true world-wide. Attitudes, styles, whatever, are running like every beat of the waves of the ocean, constantly, it just goes on and on and it's available to everybody all over, instantly. In the world that we know, I mean, not necessarily the Third World, although we affect the Third World, too, in ways that I cannot address right now, but in ways that make the most remote parts of the world perverted, changed, by our influence. Automatically, instantly, everyday, all the time. I could tell you a story, but I don't think you've got enough tape left. And, naturally, as I'm talking about cross-cultural pollination in my work and this kind of polycultural, pan-American society where all the Americans are linked culturally more and more because of immigration and the media--the media are the big factor behind all of this, endeavours seems to indicate a striving consciously to do it.
I don't strive consciously to be the ultimate universal writer for youngsters and elders alike--I don't strive consciously to do that. I strive consciously to make good art and I hope, sometimes, eventually great art. I hope to be a great artist. I don't know if I will or if I am, but that it is my goal. I always want to be better than I am; I always see it; I can see it in the future, what's going to be and how good it will be, how good it can be. On the other hand, I'm a great fan of great writers and I look at them and I am amazed, ashamed and stunned by how good other writers, musicians, painters are in reference to me. But, I also have strength in myself and see more and more, as I become more mature, just what my contribution is, just what I'm going to say, how I'm going to say it, what it is, what it can be. That's what I consciously want to do: to take what's given to me to its furthest limits and to never fall back from it, never give up; to just pursue it as far as it would go. That's what I want to do, it's to take what's given to me, to its furthest limits. And never give up, to pursue it as far as it will go. And I think it's gonna be great. That's what drives me. What drives you, when you're immature, is to do it for fun. When you're mature, it's to make great art. To discover what it is. It's in you! I have it all, every word... somewhere. Every inspiration--can I get it out, will I get it out? That's the question. Will I die tomorrow? Will I become a drunk? Will I give up? Will I change my mind? Will I become a gardener instead? But that's what I'm pursuing, that's what I'm pursuing. I'm fanatically pursuing making the art, with a kind of clock ticking against me. So, yes, I'd like to be, I'd very much like to be, the universal writer. But that's not my conscious goal. My conscious goal is to be a great artist. My goal is to make literature interesting, sexy, to bring literature back to the jaded, dull American masses, especially the young people who don't have an experience of literature and to make them realise that this is important, as important as, for us, is rock 'n' roll.
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Bilbiography
Novels
Water Music (1982)
Budding Prospects (1984)
World's End (1987)
East Is East (1990)
The Road to Wellville (1993)
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Riven Rock (1998)
A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Drop City (2003)
The Inner Circle (2004)
Talk Talk (2006)
The Women (2009)
When the Killing's Done (2011)
San Miguel (TBA?)
Short story collections
Descent of Man (1979)
Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
Without a Hero (1994)
T.C. Boyle Stories (1998) – compiles the four earlier volumes of short fiction, as well as seven previously uncollected stories.
After the Plague (2001)
Tooth and Claw (2005)
The Human Fly (2005) (previously published stories collected as young adult literature)
Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)