by Alden Nowlan
JP Your only novel, Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, dealt with your childhood in a sort of fictional way. Were you satisfied with that approach, or do you think you’ll go at it again in some other form?
AN Well, I suppose, actually, like all writers, or like most writers, all that I ever write about is what it’s like to be me. I don’t really think of Kevin O’Brien so much as being autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical, as I think of it in terms of it’s being a study of personality and a time. And of how, as time passes, we constantly are developing into different people, almost like a caterpillar developing into a butterfly, except that the butterfly then perhaps changes into a bird and the bird changes into something else. But at the same time, all those previous selves are inside us, you see. And inside each of us, somewhere, there’s a five-year-old who’s apt to get out at any moment and throw a tantrum . . . I’ve thought at various times, in fact, of doing a play in which all of the characters were various past selves of the central character, and they were encountering and interacting with one another on the stage in the same way they really do encounter and interact with one another inside us.
JP Did you write Kevin O’Brien with ease or . . . ?
AN It was very difficult for me to write Kevin O’Brien, just as it’s very difficult for me to write a play, even in collaboration. Because I think that all writers are divided into marathon runners and sprinters, and I, essentially, am a sprinter. And to be a good novelist, you have to be a marathon runner, and so Kevin O’Brien as a novel is written in a very episodic style. Some reviewers said that it was a book of short stories masquerading as a novel. That doesn’t worry me, really, because I don’t care how it’s defined as long as it works. But it was, yes, very difficult for me.
JP Did you work on it each day or in really concentrated periods?
AN I worked on it mostly in periods of intense concentration in which I would do one section of it, and then there might be an interval during which I did other things, and then I would go back to it and work on it again for a week or two weeks, very hard.
JP When you were writing Kevin O’Brien, how many words roughly would you expect to write in a day?
AN With me, it’s almost impossible to measure how many words I write a day because I rewrite so extensively. And I might very well, say, write two thousand words on Monday and throw fifteen hundred of them away on Tuesday. So it would be difficult to say whether on Monday I’d written two thousand words or only five hundred.
JP Do you think in ideas? Or do you think in words, pictures, or what?
AN I’m . . . not sure, really, how anyone thinks. I tend to think that we probably all are essentially like primitive man, and we really exist on a purely emotional level, in that we feel things in our guts. The only difference being that as civilized men we feel we must give some plausible verbal formulation to this feeling, so we invent words and make it into a plausible theory, but it really originated in what we felt here [he indicates his gut].
JP Do you take your dreams seriously? Do they affect your work?
AN It’s funny about dreams. One of the most frustrating things about dreams that I’ve found as a writer is that on several occasions I’ve had a dream which, while I was dreaming and during the first few seconds after I woke up, seemed to me to be the nucleus of an absolutely great poem. And sometimes I’ve even scribbled it down in the night, and almost invariably the next day, it turned out to be absolute gibberish. So while I think that dreams may have meaning, it’s probably just a meaning that applies in the dream. I have very interesting dreams. I think I have a far more interesting life when I’m asleep, in some ways, than I do when I’m awake.
JP You were telling me this morning about a poem that actually did work out that came from a dream.
AN Yes, I have one poem which actually came straight from a dream. Well, in fact, it was a nightmare. And I had the nightmare and woke up and wrote it down and didn’t change a word of it. And not only was it . . . not only did I use it in a book, but it’s probably been reprinted more often than any other of my poems. It’s called “The Execution.”
JP You came very close to death. How did that affect your work and your life in general?
AN Well, the effects of coming close to death weren’t nearly as radical as you might expect, simply because we’re mercifully able to put death out of our minds so easily. I probably find it harder than most people, and I think it’s probably a very healthy thing to think about death. I think that far from it being a morbid thing, if I were one of these people like a maharishi, instead of suggesting that people sit down and meditate, I would suggest that they sit down each day and think about their own death for five, ten, or fifteen minutes. And I think they would be much happier during the rest of the day and probably much kinder to the people around them.
JP And that’s the effect it had on you, basically?
AN I think so, yes.
JP What do you think happens to you after you die?
AN I’m not sure. I would be inclined to think that the same thing happens to us after we die as happens to a rose or a bird or any other thing that’s alive. The only kind of afterlife which I find emotionally plausible is the kind of afterlife which the ancient Greeks believed in, in which the dead exist in a kind of shadow land in which they’re perhaps not completely aware that they are dead. You know, I find the traditional kind of Christian eschatology completely implausible.
JP No pearly gates for you?
AN I’m afraid not, though it’s been a wonderfully useful imagery and great things have been said about it. Chesterton, a man whom I admire enormously and, of course, a man who was a Catholic, said a marvellous thing once. He said that there is a hell, but God never sends anyone there.