MC: Does writing still give you pleasure at all? You've said that when you first started doing it, it made you high like the drugs you used to take, only without their negative effects. Is that still the case? Or is it more of release valve for negative inner pressure these days? Or is it a combination of both?
TL: Writing has always brought me more satisfaction than pleasure. I've always enjoyed the planning stage of a new story more than writing the story itself. That's when the story seems to have unlimited possibilities. I try not to work out the elements too quickly because each idea, character, setting, etc. erodes those possibilities. Due to this effect, I deliberately didn't outline beforehand how the characters in My Work Is Not Yet Done would be done in. This enabled me to look forward to how each of them would get it and how each method would work with other aspects of the story.
MC: So many modern-day pop fiction authors emphasize the old saw that "story comes first." I think of Stephen King, for example, who has said this many times. Even a lot of literary writers agree with it. "With me," Bernard Malamud once said, "it's story, story, story." I recall once in the past when you were asked about the near absence of plot in some of your stories, you said you had never understood what your readers were talking about when they mentioned this, since you had always thought your stories contained as much plot as anybody else's. Personally, when I think of the many vignettes you've written, and also your more overtly experimental pieces (such as "Notes on the Writing of Horror"), and also such pieces as "Ghost Stories for the Dead," in which you foregrounded the horrific philosophical speculation and presented the actual story or plot in an oblique and almost subliminal fashion—I have to admit that I understand what your many readers have been asking about. And I certainly don't consider this submergence of plot to be a detriment. I think all those writers who offer a one-size-fits-all recommendation based on the "story first" approach are simply making an adage out of their private preference. I think they're probably the type of readers who revel in story, and so when they go to write their own fiction, this is how they approach it. What's your take on all this?
TL: I agree with your analysis. It seems natural to me that people who like to read stories will, if they are writers, like to write stories. For my part, I don't care for stories that are just stories. I feel there's something missing from them. What's missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author's consciousness. In most literary novels, the author is there in the spaces between the characters and the scenery, but I like to see the author out front and the rest in the background. Aside from the stories you mentioned in your question, I believe my own stories to have story galore within them. But these are only pretexts, coat racks on which to hang what's really important to me, which is my own sensibility. That's all I really have to work with. Most writers adore observing other people and the lives they lead, then making up a story about them. They really pay attention to the world around them. This is something I literally can't do. I just don't care about what makes people tick, and, as Sherlock Holmes said, I see but do not observe. It just seems completely trivial and useless to pay attention to these things. I'm no more interested in the physical universe, which sends scientists into raptures of rhetoric but doesn't impress me in the least. I can't fathom why anyone should care about how the universe began, how it works, or how it will end. More triviality and uselessness. At the same time, I'm in awe of writers who are adept at telling stories, just as I'm in awe of people who speak foreign languages or play a musical instrument really well. But that doesn't mean that I want to read their stories or listen to them talk or make music. As Morrissey says in the Smiths' song "Panic": "Because the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life." The work of writers such as Malamud, William Styron, Saul Bellow, et al. not only says nothing to me about my life, but it says nothing to me about what I've experienced or thought of life broadly speaking. By contrast, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Bernhard say plenty of things about both my life in particular and life in general as I have experienced and thought of it. I can take an interest in the writing of these authors because they seem to have felt and thought as I have. William Burroughs once said that the job of the writer is to reveal to readers what they know but don't know that they know. But you have to be pretty close to knowing it or you won't know it when you see it.
"I couldn't possibly write something that would reflect the true depths of my aversion to everything that exists. Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics—food, shelter, and clothing—but life wouldn't be any more than that. It wouldn't need to be." MC: How much conscious effort do you put into the poetic quality of your prose? I'm talking about its prosody—meter and sound and all that. I think I recall Raymond Carver recounting how when he was a student of John Gardner's, Gardner would analyze his prose in painstaking detail, going through it line by line and performing scansion on it like poetry. Do you do anything like that with your own writing? Do you intentionally write and/or revise with an eye (and ear) to creating effects through the artful deployment of language techniques? Or do you just forage around for the right general feeling?
TL: Unless I'm emulating the style of another writer, such as Bruno Schulz or Thomas Bernhard, I follow a tone of voice that I have in my head. This supplies the rhythm and pace I want, the music of the story, and makes the narrative accommodating to any poetic devices I might want to use, principally metaphor. I can't imagine scanning another writer's prose. But Gardner was a scholar of Middle English literature, so his guidance as writing teacher was probably useful to Carver, who wrote short in a sort of blank verse style. The trouble in being too preoccupied with how your work sounds in English is that this has little bearing on how it'll sound in translation. This is going to sound monumentally egotistical, but at an early stage in my writing I became conscious of using wordplay that I knew wouldn't translate well into another language. That came out of my obsession with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. So I stopped doing too much of that, which is difficult because wordplay comes fairly natural to me. And the problem with wordplay that's too abstruse is this: if a reader doesn't get it, then it was a waste of time to do it in the first place; if a reader does get it, it's not really that much to get. I've analyzed the double entendres and multilingual puns in several of Nabokov's books. That's not what's of most interest about him as a writer. What is interesting is his idiosyncratic persona and his obsession with death, harm, loss, and all those bad things which are at the core of literature in general but which, for a major big shot writer of the modern era, are especially pronounced in Nabokov.
MC: I recall from prior interviews that your earliest introduction to horror fiction came through Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and H.P. Lovecraft. Do you think any of these initial reading experiences strongly affected the type of fiction you wanted to write? I'm not talking so much about content as authorial approach. I know your breakdown at age 17 provided the emotional and philosophical foundation for all of your writing. But in tandem with the question about plot and story above, I'm wondering if you think your stylistic approach was in part determined by your experiences as a reader, or if it was less a matter of determination and more a matter of confirmation.
TL: Shirley Jackson shouldn't be included in this group. I read The Haunting of Hill House because I had seen and liked the movie and, in those days without video, couldn't see it whenever I wanted. So I read the novel when I came across it by chance and was stuck somewhere without anything else to do. It didn't make me want to write about similar subject matter or in the style of Shirley Jackson, but it did make me want to read other works of horror fiction, even though at the time I didn't know if there were any or what they were like. Practically the o
nly fiction I had read at that time was the Sherlock Holmes stories. I enjoyed those quite a bit because I identified with the neurosis of Holmes, as well as his use of drugs. The next horror writer I read was Arthur Machen, who wrote very much about the same milieu as the Holmes stories: foggy London streets and creepy countryside settings. Then I read Poe and Lovecraft for the first time and found what I didn't know I was looking for: writers who put themselves on every page of their work, who wrote like personal essayists and lyric poets. Every fiction writer I've ever admired wrote in this manner. I say "wrote," in the past tense, because they're all dead now. Any other type of fiction writer doesn't exist for me.
MC: Have you ever gotten stuck while writing a story? As in, you didn't know your way ahead?
TL: No, I've never gotten stuck. I've always had to know enough about the story I'm going to write and be enthusiastic about it to make it worth the bother to write the thing in the first place. So I meditate on it, make tons of notes, ask myself if there is something missing from the story that should be there or something that's there and shouldn't be, and rack my brain to take the idea of the story to the farthest limit it will allow. Satisfied that the story will be worth writing, I start writing it. In the process, I usually come up with better ideas than I had originally planned. If that didn't happen, the story would only be adequate, as a number of my stories have been. It's not possible to plan every metaphor and structural aspect ahead of time, of course. I've had to trust that my abilities in these areas won't let me down.
MC: That leads me to a separate but related question: Have you ever suffered from writer's block? I mean as a condition distinct from simply being stuck in the middle of a story. The best description of what I'm talking about comes from poet Thom Gunn: "There are certain times when you are absolutely sterile, that is, when words seem to mean nothing. The words are there, the things in the world are there, you are interested in things in the same way and theoretically you can think up subjects for poems, but you simply can't write. You can sit down at your notebook with a good idea for a poem and nothing will come. It's as though there is a kind of light missing from the world. It's a wordless world, and it's somehow an empty and rather sterile world. I don't know what causes this, but it's very painful." When I first encountered these words they gave me a literal shiver, because they describe an experience that has hounded me for years. It feels distinctly different from the so-called "fallow period" in the creative process. It's more like inner death. I was amazed when you told one interviewer that you had never experienced writer's block, because I would have thought your painful subjective life, and especially yours bouts with anhedonia, would have elicited this experience many times. Or am I using the term in a different sense than you meant when you gave that answer?
TL: Whenever I've wanted to write something, I've always been able to write it. The problem for me is not being unable to write, but not caring at all about writing . . . or anything else. In a state of anhedonia, everything is revealed in its true purposelessness and inanity. You can argue with my use of "true" in the last sentence. But you'd also have to argue with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, which have no use for anything, let alone short stories. Buddhism isn't my point of departure, but I'm in a similar place. I'm completely detached from anything, including myself and anyone around me. Doing anything just seems plain stupid, which in my opinion it ultimately is. This is the lesson of anhedonia, which is an eminently rational state. But if you're going to do anything, you must be in an irrational state of emotion, and without this irrationality your life is just numbers: how long, how much, how many, how far. Emotion gives an illusory focus and meaning to our lives. When the feeling is gone, so is that sense. This sense is a motivator yet it also fools you into thinking that something is important when it's not in the least important, except as an engine for your meaningless life. But I don't feel that anhedonia is "painful" in the way that Thom Gunn is saying that writer's block is painful. That is, I'm not agonized that I want to write and can't. Also known as "melancholic depression," anhedonia is painful, but that pain has nothing to do with not being able to respond emotionally to anything. The anhedonic can't even conceive of wanting to have his emotions back. That, too, seems stupid and empty and useless. All you want is for the hurt to stop. But even suicide seems pointless. One would have to become emotionally energized past the anhedonia in order to conceive of suicide as a solution. I know that all of this is not possible for non-anhedonics to understand. I could say that it's like being emotionally blind, deaf, dumb, mute, and totally paralyzed, but such similes aren't effective unless you've gone through the experience yourself. But as bad as anhedonia may be, it's a cakewalk compared to panic-anxiety disorder. Okay, enough bellyaching about my disorders. Everybody's got their own shit to deal with.
MC: Then let's veer away towards some other types of questions, although not before I enter my opinion that you've done a great job of talking about panic-anxiety disorder in your fiction, which delivers a potent dose of the horrific sense of reality that characterizes the condition. I'll also add that I know what I'm talking about from the way my personal experiences of such states have locked hands with the warped world of your stories. But moving on: For well over a year now you've been laboring on your nonfiction philosophical magnum opus, The Conspiracy against the Human Race. I recall that when some of your ideas from that one made their way into the excellent interview that Neddal Ayad conducted with you for Fantastic Metropolis last year, you were criticized by a couple of people at online venues for what they took to be your overinflation of your personal opinions into blanket judgments of value. Specifically, I remember somebody taking you to task for comparing Lovecraft to Shakespeare and evidently judging Lovecraft the greater of the two when you said that "for Lovecraft, unlike Shakespeare, the revelation of life as an idiot's tale is the alpha and omega of his work. He doesn't just pay passing lip service to what is the most profound and obvious fact of life—he makes it the core of his work." You have also told me that at least one acquaintance of yours who read an early draft of The Conspiracy against the Human Race simply couldn't get a handle on the fact that in its dark and despairing diagnosis of life, you're talking about the way the world seems, and has to seem, to you as a specific individual, as opposed to advancing its outlook as objective truth. Would you care to say anything about all this, maybe to try and set the record straight?
TL: Well, I never said that Lovecraft was better writer than "honey-tongued Shakespeare," as one contemporary described him. But Shakespeare was a playwright. Today he would be the kind of novelist whose work I've described in response to an earlier question. His characters say things that appeal to me, and they say it well, but that's not Shakespeare talking. Hamlet's gloomy ramblings were cribbed by Magpie of Avon from Girolamo Cardano's De Consolatione, which has since come to be known as "Hamlet's Book." So I don't know who Shakespeare was, and I can't tell from his works. One can form a good idea of who Lovecraft was from his fiction alone, and I definitely feel closer to him than to Shakespeare. This is something that doesn't matter to most readers, who just want to escape to someplace outside their world and yet at the same time want that other world to be in a significant way like their own, that is, where things happen that they can understand. Shakespeare didn't write anything that even the dullest imagination can't understand. It's all soap operas and romantic comedies, just the kind of thing that people enjoy today. Lovecraft doesn't write for the same audience. He wrote for the sensitive few rather than the happy many. As for my Unabomber-style essay The Conspiracy against the Human Race, this is by no means a philosophical work, let alone a magnum opus. It's a synthesis of ideas I've formed over my life and of other people's ideas that rhyme with mine. The disconnect that anyone may perceive in this work between what I think and the way I've articulated it is something they can know nothing about. To me, there is no disconnection. I couldn't possibly write something that would reflect the true depths of my aversion to ever
ything that exists. As far as putting words into other people's mouths, as if what seems true to me is what is really true, this is just a commonly used device in writing personal essays. Everyone preaches to the converted. If I didn't believe my thoughts were superior to and truer than the thoughts of people who disagree with me, then I would think something else. And I would think that was superior and truer. Even some scientists who can be almost conclusively demonstrated to be wrong still cling to their erroneous views. This is one of the running themes of The Conspiracy against the Human Race. Truth works within a very tiny, often self-reflexive framework. Three of a kind always beats two pair. Someone believes God exists because a book tells them he does; they believe the book is true because lots of people have told them that it's the word of God. Plus they like what the book says—that's the most important thing. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't believe it. I think that's the problem I'm encountering in responses to TCATHR. Its readers not only haven't liked what it says, they also don't like that someone they know and to whom they feel otherwise well-disposed could write such a book. It's disturbing, as if you found out your best friend was a serial killer who liked to eat the brains of toddlers. The essay is essentially about how humans can't handle unpleasant realities and what those realities are. But we're predisposed not to think about those things in a way that will affect how we live, or to think about them at all in most cases. I know that's exactly how I am myself. If I weren't, I would be in worse shape than I already am. I certainly wouldn't be doing this interview. I wouldn't even have written TCATHR. If someone says that I'm stupid and wrong, then there's nothing I can say in response except maybe, "Am not." It's really a pain in the ass living in a world of people, including myself, who can't just stop thinking.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 132