by David Lipsky
[Maybe just painfully, humanly honest.
Later. We’re quiet.]
It’s not just “aw-shucks, I’m just in from the country, I’m not really a writer, I’m just a regular guy.” I’m not trying to lay some kind of shit. And I’m—
But you just did it again. You just laid it on me, I mean …
[We turn off the tape. He asks me to stop talking. David’s driving. I start to mumble-sing R.E.M. to myself, it’s so dark I forget I’m not alone. Then I’m embarrassed, and look over, and David is mumble-singing too, and we head down the road in the front of the car.]
• • •
BACK IN BLOOMINGTON
KEY IN DOOR
DOG TAILS THUMPING, BARKING
DAVID DROPS BAG, RELIEVED
[This is hello to the dogs. The dogs go crazy when Dave steps in. He kneels on the ground: they go after him like the boy in my dad’s old ad. Nudging, licking, batting, sniffing.]
(Elvis voice) I’m never leaving you again, baby. I swear, I swear.
[Looks around, a little rug check, some dog staining.]
(To dogs) Nothing wrong with a little shit on the floor, you guys. Happens to the best of us, hey guys?
[Can hear ice flow in the pipes, he says. He bangs around house, checking the pipes. He runs the water out, to stop icing and cracking.
“L.A. Times called” … on notepaper.
“What do you know about yarn?” he asks me. I turn out not to know a thing about yarn.
We walk dogs down street; empty, soft breezes, street iced, long views. David with hands in pockets. We’re waiting on Drone’s and Jeeves’s pleasure.]
You get instantaneous production from the Jeevester. Drone’s a much tougher nut.
[On the neighborhood] People burn leaves when they want to, there’s a slaughterhouse close by, it’s kind of a savage area. There’s a couple trailer parks around.
[Looks for mail in box. DFW, the box says.]
Peeing in the snow, that’s a good thing. [We’re heading back inside; still feels weird in the legs and under the sneakers to walk, after such a long time in the car.] Now I’ve just gotta clean up some shit. That I can handle, cleaning up shit. God, it’s good to be home. Nothing like a little excremental work …
[Hears voice on tape: I’m checking the last one, to see where we left off.]
God, is that what my voice sounds like?
[Tennis case: Trophies. Unpacking. His beat-up shaving case.
Like many men who live alone, has a toilet seat in the upright position in the bathroom. The toilet seat is padded.]
I should check my e-mail. Can I …?
My phone line is your phone line. My fridge is your fridge. My spare blanket is your spare blanket.
[I say this, and then am sort of embarrassed, as we aren’t going to do an e-mail interview. I remember our earlier e-mail conversation, when I first arrived. His reason for not having a modem in house. David: “If I can get out, they can get in.” No info re who they might be.
Cans of pop by the case. Lots of vitamins on the trip.]
I end up drinking ten or twelve Diet Rites a day, and end up leaving ’em around—I used to drink Diet Cokes, but then a friend said that there was enormous amounts of salt in it. And that it actually made you thirstier, so I switched over to this. Which to me is a bit thin and overcarbonated, but at least it doesn’t make you—[Funny, he pounds them. Two six-packs a day.]
[But he thinks he ought to just accept that his intake is massive and start buying in quantity, instead of multitrip days.]
I should buy six cases, as opposed to just buying one and constantly running out. I leave ’em around, can’t tell which ones are fresh and which ones aren’t.
[Tells me he read Lord of the Rings five times as a teenager.
Gets an idea, walks to the kitchen. “The cookies we bought the first night are still in there.”]
You loved Tolkien. Is it a pleasure to have written a book long enough so readers can lose themselves in your world, same way you did in Tolkien’s?
I think it’s different though. ’Cause this is a harder book, and it’s more in chunks. I mean, the thing about Tolkien is, it’s a very long linear narrative, where you feel like you yourself are on a voyage. And this is much more …
But on the Web boards I’ve visited, people do speak about it as if entering a different world …
That would be very neat.
[We’re chewing the chilly cookies, from a plastic take-out container. Jeeves pads over and drops down directly on the carpet in front of us.]
[About Jeeves] You see, Jeeves gets very obedient when there’s food around. You sit, Drone. You know, it should be clear by now that you’re not getting any of this. Good dog.
[I ask him what he listened to when writing the novel.]
In Syracuse, I didn’t listen to anything, because I didn’t have a tape player. But when I was here, I was listening to Nirvana, because a grad student gave me that. And then this woman named Enya, who’s Scottish.
[David pulls his tapes out, fires up the stereo, sits on the floor. First he plays is Bush. “Glycerine” does come from the Brian Eno song, as he demonstrates. Dave is singing along.]
The song is “The Big Ship;” it’s off an album called Another Green World.
You researched for about a year and a half and then you wrote for about another year and half?
Nah, I think I started researching this thing—there’s a real funny thing, I don’t know, did you read Sven Birkert’s thing? Sven had this whole argument about how, he went back and read this Harper’s thing that had names of characters in it, and there was clear evidence that the tennis stuff in the book was autobiographical. I can’t understand why Sven would make a mistake of that size …
Let’s go back. You saw your name on the Esquire rising-star “Guide to the Literary Universe” thing in ’87.
So that was the summer at Yaddo. And that was also the summer that I—it was an interesting summer, because I wrote the first half of this novella called “Westward,” which was a big deal for me. Anyway, I wrote the first half of that, and then went down to New York for this abortive Us magazine shoot, that’s where I got to meet the fabled Tama Janowitz. And then like walked out of the shoot, it was just a terrible thing, ended up spending the night at a friend’s house near Washington Square.
And my car got broken into. And the half of the thing was just all handwritten. The first half was real different. The trunk got broken into, it got stolen. It was really funny, because they clearly took this airline bag out, looked through it, and then threw it away. And I found actually the bag in a Dumpster, about two blocks away. The thing was gone. And I figured they used it to, I don’t know, light their crack pipes with or something.
So then I’m in terrible—anyway, so I go back to Yaddo, I rewrite that thing. And then for the next two months was like typin’ that manuscript, gettin’ it ready. And then, when I was at Yaddo, I got a job. I got an offer to teach for one semester at the university which I’d just graduated from. So that fall I go and I live at Amherst and I teach. Very bizarre, because there were students in that class who’d been in classes with me as a student, when I was, like, a senior and they were freshmen.
Weird.
It was very weird. And then what all happened?
Wait—how is that possible? Had they taken time off?
No—I graduated in spring of ’85 and taught there fall of ’87. So one year had passed.
No, two.
Yeah. So they would have been freshman my last year and now they were first semester seniors.
When you were walking around looking for your bag, were you thinking, Fuck, this is what happens when I get big ideas about myself and do press appearances? Symbolic in a way.
God, no—all I could think of was: I mean, I’d spent three months writing the first half. And it’s weird, I went back to Yaddo, and wrote a first draft of the whole thing in, like, a week. No, I don’t think …
I don’t think I read my life very effectively then.
OK, in ’88 I lived at home. And then I lived in a little cabin in the desert in Tucson for a while. I was rewriting—there were like three or four things that had to be rewritten for the book. [Girl with Curious Hair.]
And then this—there was this whole messy thing, and I don’t know what you know about it. Stories that were in that book appeared in various magazines. And one was the Letterman story. Which, um, the version in the book was very different than the version that I turned in. Or that sold to Alice, had sold to Alice at Playboy. Because the first version had a whole lot of stuff that was from an actual Letterman interview. And, um, it never occurred to me to tell ’em this, I mean the whole story was structured so that you couldn’t tell what was made up and what was true. But anyway, um, like two weeks before Playboy went to press, they reran that interview. It was one of those Letterman rerun nights. And the shit really hit the fan. Alice had this idea that I’d like intentionally tried to embarrass her, somehow. She really went on this paranoid fantasy. And actually, the thing ended up coming out … meanwhile, Playboy’s lawyers called Viking’s lawyers, and clued them in about what was going on, and then they started looking at the Jeopardy! story. And at “Westward,” and the Johnson story, and the fact that a lot of the minor characters were real people.
And so a lot of the time in Tucson—I lived in Champaign winter of ’88. And then I moved to Tucson for four months, and then I moved back to Champaign for like five months all through ’88, early ’89. And basically, the book got killed. Viking already put a cover—it’s weird. A collector showed me, the collector’s got a bound galley of the Viking version of the book. Which, you know, for collectors now apparently it’s like an upside-down postage stamp, it’s just worth thousands of dollars, because Viking killed it. It’s weird—they didn’t even think they were gonna lose, they just thought they’d get sued.
Hey, Drone! Are you gonna eat my chair?
How’d you feel?
It was a very confusing time. Because they invoked the principle of what they called the right of publicity. Not right to privacy, but a right to publicity, such that publishing the Jeopardy! story would be the equivalent of my capitalizing on a physical resemblance to Pat Sajak—like running around at mall openings as Pat Sajak, and receiving income that was rightfully his. Which seemed to me so utterly bizarre.
But of course, the letters I’m writing were legally stupid. They’re these long, impassioned, rhetorical things invoking literary principles and broad social, you know: “these people impose themselves on our consciousness but we are not allowed to reconfigure them …”
So it was a very weird time. And this was also a time when—I really think that for me just personally, “Westward” was this real seminal thing, like I really felt like I’d killed this huge part of myself doing it.
Nabokov says same thing: you write a book to get rid of, do away with that part of yourself.
This was about a whole orientation to fictional theory. I’ve always wondered if Barth read it, it’s simultaneously absolutely homicidal and a fawning homage.
And then during all this time, I really, I mean I was really in a panic. Because I didn’t think I was gonna be able to write anymore. And I got this idea that I’d started while being a student, and the writing was recreation from the student work. And what I’d do is contrive a situation where I applied to Princeton and Harvard in philosophy. Got a very sweet deal from Harvard. And so went out there early in ’89, and moved into Boston, moved into this apartment with my friend Mark Costello.
Let me see: well, I did a bunch of stuff while I was there. That’s when he and I wrote Signifying Rappers. And I wrote—I never published it—wrote a really long essay about video pornography. That actually Playboy helped me get on these sets by claiming I was a Playboy writer. I have some really riveting taped interviews with porn stars, too. And uh, did that, did a bunch of stuff, the long essay about Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
Anyway, started at Harvard. And it was just real obvious that, like, I was so far away from that world. They had this idea that a grad student—I mean, you were a full-time grad student. I mean, there wasn’t time to write on the side, there was four hundred pages of Kant theory to read you know every three days.
[Drone’s stomach goes off. Loudly.]
And then Girl with Curious Hair was resold to Norton?
What happened was Gerry Howard, who was the editor at Viking, left for unrelated reasons. Went to Norton. Somehow he really believed in the book, and convinced Norton just to buy it. And to get Viking to give like—had me change some names like Leo Burnett and stuff like that. And then published it with Norton. So it’s weird. I mean, there’s all this stuff about that Norton didn’t publish the book well, that nobody paid any attention to it. And it’s more like, Man, if it hadn’t been for him, that book wouldn’t’ve (“wouldn’ta”) come out at all.
That book gets passed around a lot.
[Jeeves now going crazy; batting things, barking.]
Yeah. I think it was fairly big in a kind of underground, New York way. But in terms of like, I mean Broom of the System sold way more than that did. That just died. Fell stillborn from the presses, as Hume said of his book.
Hey Jeeves! We’re trying to talk, I’m going to put you in your crate. You need to hush.
How well did Broom sell?
I don’t know. But I know they made their money back on it. And I know that Norton never made their money back—no, Norton did make their money back, ’cause of what Avon paid them for the paperback. But Avon hasn’t made their money back yet.
Yeah, Norton’s got a new paperback, which actually … I gave them, just ’cause of Gerry. Because they couldn’t really offer me money for it. But I just—that’s as much Gerry’s book as it is mine. So anyway, and so—that was also the fall, I mean I got to Harvard, I quit drinkin’ that summer.
And the thing at Harvard was just unbelievably bleak. [Strange. So calm about it here in his living room, his house. Willing to just talk, no chess or feints, just tell his story.] But that’s the semester that I went into McLean. That’s the semester that I got really worried I was going to kill myself.
And so—and it was a big deal for me, because I was so embarrassed going in. But I think it was the first time I’ve ever treated myself like I was worth something. Was, I mean—having to go to the Harvard shrink, and say, “Look, I think there’s this issue, you know? I don’t feel real safe.”
She had me go in, which meant droppin’ out of Harvard, which meant I had to talk to Warren Goldfarb, the chair at Harvard. And it was just unbelievably mortifying. And I was willin’ to do it. I guess to stay alive. Which in retrospect was probably promising.
This is …
This is late fall of ’89. And then I never went back. I mean, I got out of McLean’s fairly quickly. And uh, I never went back.
Curious Hair comes out when? Same time?
I think it did. But I didn’t really notice it coming out. I mean, I think I gave, I remember I gave one reading at the Cambridge public library. That had thirteen people in the audience, one of whom was a schizophrenic lady who kept shrieking during the reading. (Laughs, shakes head) It was just a bleak, just a bleak time.
But reviews were really strong.
The only one I remember is that somebody said it was kind of exhibitionistic. And they thought it was show-offy. I don’t remember—I don’t even think—did it even get reviewed in The New York Times? It was a bleak time. I don’t think I was payin’ much attention to anything other than good old yours truly.
Happy to see it coming out then, though? What was bothering you at that time? Some connection between desire for approval and your writing?
I was just unbelievably sad. All the time. And didn’t think I was going to be able to write anymore. And I think that book’s coming out was sort of, seemed more like a kind of, a kind of shrill jagged laugh from the universe. About, you know,
I’m done, and now this thing, what was it like? This thing sort of lingers like a really nasty fart behind me. You know? For like a further—you know, and if it does really well, then it’s a further reminder of the fact that I’m like, that I’m screwed.
Because you thought you’d lost the ability to write?
Well, I just thought I’d, I just didn’t see the point of it anymore. I mean, the stuff that I was interested in seemed—I mean, I really felt like “Westward” had, at least for me, had sort of folded it up into this tiny, infinitely dense thing. And that it had kind of exploded.
But which makes it sound like I’m talking very grandiosely about the story. And it’s much more about—um, it was partly that. It was partly, I think a lot of it was I think I’d really for two or three years leaned on, ah, leaned on drinkin’ hard as a way to deal with stuff. And it’s real weird, you do that, and then you take it away—yeah. Things get tense. And you know, I just made enormous mistakes.
I think going to Harvard was a huge mistake. I was too old to be in grad school. I didn’t wanna be an academic philosopher anymore. But I was incredibly, um, humiliated, to drop out. Let’s not forget that my father’s a philosophy professor, that a lot of the professors there were revered by him. That he knew a couple of them. [In a sense, the Moby-Dick thing again.] There was just an enormous amount of terrible stuff going on. But I left there and I didn’t go back.