PETER
QUINONES: |
I notice
that you observe seemingly trivial things that people do, or that
happen...the sorts of things we all witness hundreds of times
a week but that don't really register on our conscious radar,
like:
"Clark sighed and peeled dead skin
from his thumb's pad."
"He turned his wedding band on his finger."
"She heated chicken soup, with its slight tang of tin can."
In my opinion, a few such observations don't have much effect,
but when they're sharply presented—and just often enough,
so as not to be monotonous—they really give fiction a great
power of authenticity. Is this something you learned to do or
is it natural, so to speak? Is it something you would try to teach
students in a fiction writing class?
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MICHAEL
PRITCHETT:
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Detail
definitely does not come naturally to me—especially the kind
of "vivid, significant detail" to quote Henry James,
that is essential for writing good realism. One of my writing
profs, Charlie Baxter, once said to me that, to the degree that
we can include specific physical detail in our writing, that's
the degree to which our work contains real life. Ergo, no detail,
no life. For me, it's very important to study my characters in
my mind's eye and look for those small details that will bring
the reader in very close, in much the same way that a filmmaker
wants to include some super tight close-ups in their film. It
reduces the distance between the reader and hero and, sometimes,
it can even erase it completely. That's what I hope will happen
when I include those details, and I certainly tell my students
to try for the same in their own writing. I think it's doubly
important in historical writing, of course, because the distance
that the writer must try to erase between the reader and hero
is much greater. In the case of the three details you mention,
I included the one about Clark's thumb because it's such a mundane
gesture and it somehow helped me to relate to Clark as a real
guy, not an American legend...someone with a real thumb,
if you will. The detail about the wedding ring is there because
it's one of Bill's essential problems in life—his discomfort
with that ring. And the detail about the soup is there because
it shows how Bill finds the false note in everything he experiences.
Life generally tastes of tin to Bill, and that's a key to his
depression, I think.
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| PQ: |
I used to
be a heavy smoker, so I was taken aback by the passages about
Bill's smoking. For example:
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"He
drew carefully on each puff, smoking the marrow out of each
one, feeling the drug spreading through him and turning
every switch to "on". The true savor of life,
whatever one was able to get out of it, was about this:
holding each moment carefully and long and concentrating.
He got a funny, buzzy feeling in his chest from the drug,
like it was full of moths, and his heart beat hard, maybe
too hard."
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Wow! Is this an examination of the psycho-physical roots of vice,
or something else?
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MP:
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The
way Bill smokes is sort of special to him, but not entirely unusual,
I don't think. I haven't smoked a great deal, but when I have,
and from what I've observed, I've been aware of a certain kind
of smoker who smokes with almost a desperation or hunger, and
not for the nicotine only but for something larger than that,
and larger than pleasure. It's as if we/they are trying to draw
some quality of life into ourselves through the cigarette that
we are starved for, something that we thought life would contain
that seems to be lacking, something we were promised in childhood
that never materialized. That something is what the depressive
person is starved for, and feels a constant frustrated desire
for, and yet can't articulate. And probably it can't be articulated.
There are certain kinds of human unhappiness that can't be stamped
out, for some reason, no matter how ideal our existence becomes.
I think the depressive person is more intensely conscious of this
type of unhappiness, but is unfortu nately no more aware of how
to cure it than anyone else. So, that's a long answer to why Bill
smokes the way that he does, but I think that's some of what it's
about.
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PQ:
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Is
it accurate to say that, in certain ways, the story is really
about Man's—capital M—pursuit of Woman—capital
W? I'm thinking of a passage like "...she
was the golden one, the dark-eyed one who always danced out of
his reach, who ducked his kiss, and stood him up".
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MP:
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To
a degree, yes, I do see Bill as being a somewhat anomalous but
also fairly normal guy. And I think his obsession with Woman is
fairly common. It's always seemed to me that when a man looks
at a woman, what seems to be there, in her beauty, is a promise
of something much more than one human being can actually deliver
to another. I think that the reaction inside a man looking at
an attractive woman is one of such joy, pleasure, hope and need
that it immediately gets confused, mixed up in, our overall desire
and lust for life. Which can cause us to confuse the two and think
they are one thing, that the perfect woman will equate to the
perfect life. And that's a great deal more than is fair for a
man to ask of a woman, and vice-versa, in my opinion. But it's
a pitfall that Bill has fallen into, and he's having a hard time
finding his way back out of it again. He's equated the two things
for so long, he's having a hard time separating them again.
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PQ:
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Towards
the end of the story the modern day Lewis dreams about his mother
and he has a thought that seems to me to tbe the key passage of
the whole novel. I wonder if you could comment on this a little.
It is: "He almost blurted it out then.
That if men hadn't come home, and still didn't want to, it was
because of the mission, the one every man was secretly enlisted
in, to go far away into enemy territory, to explore, reconnoiter,
kill the enemy, win the girl, come back a hero."
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MP:
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I
agree that that passage comes close to articulating one of the
key things I think I figured out about Bill, and Lewis, and myself,
probably, while writing the book. It has to do with what may be
an innate human need for fundamental importance. I don't think
it's only a male need, but I did write that passage with the intent
of taking women out of the question for a moment and looking just
at men. The problem that Bill has finally stated to himself is
that life doesn't offer every man the opportunity to be of fundamental
importance. And I also think that when you place a man in a position
where it is very hard for him to be important, to feel important,
at the center of large events and large life and death decisions,
what you create is a desperate and trapped human being who can't
be tr usted because he has been cut off from an essential need
like air, water or food. In Lewis' case, I think he has what he
needs when he's on the expedition. But once it is over, he is
no longer at the center of the kind of big concern he can command,
and he becomes desperate, untrustworthy, even dangerous. Bill
has a similar problem; but, as long as he keeps writing, he manages
to keep some sort of grasp on this state, being at the center
of a large undertaking. But it's tenuous, and he too is becoming
somewhat dangerous. What we still haven't dealt with in our industrial
societies, if you ask me, is the fact that too many people/men
are cut off from acceptable, legal ways to place themselves at
the center of a large concern. Which means they are either forced
to meet this basic need by lying, cheating, stealing, killing,
or to commit suicide, which is exactly what any of us will resort
to if you cut us off from air, water or food.
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PQ:
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In
writing about real life historical characters whose ultimate fate
is known to the reader in advance, what is the main challenge?
How much of the material came from journals, historical research,
etc., and how much from your imagination?
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MP:
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When
I read the expedition journals, I felt that I'd come across a
'found' novel, one that took a clear and almost immediate shape
in my mind. Since the 200th anniversary of the expedition was
coming up, and it appeared it was time again for the nation to
examine this achievement, I decided that I'd try to write the
book that had sort of fallen whole into my mind. It took several
tries and, meanwhile, the anniversary almost passed me by completely.
For a writer, the great thing about the mystery surrounding Lewis
and why he dies so young, is that very little is known about what
he was doing in the last year of his life. So, the field is pretty
wide open as far as inventing w hat happens to him at the end.
And even if he was on the expedition with thirty other people,
he was practically the only one keeping a record of what was happening,
which again leaves a fiction writer free to invent anything that
might have been going on that he wouldn't have recorded in an
official account. Nor does anyone know what he was thinking every
moment, so there is plenty of room for creating a possible stream
of consciousness for him. Before I started writing, I was fairly
worried that I was learning so much about the expedition that
I wasn't going to have room left to invent anything. But it turns
out that that's an ability of mine, to write at my best when there
are lots of rules to follow, lots of facts to honor. Though I
didn't know that when I started the project.
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PQ:
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Although
he's really a minor character in the novel, I sense that you're
making a large point about the writing of fiction and the writing
of history by making use of Washington Irving. Herotodus is known
as both the Father of History and the Father of Lies; in your
view, what are the similarities and differences between the historian
and the novelist?
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MP:
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I
found it sad that Irving gave up writing stories toward the end
of his career because his reviews were so bad. And I thought it
ironic that he decided to start writing history books, instead,
as though he no longer trusted himself to write made-up stories,
or was afraid that nobody would read his work unless he based
it on fact. The odd thing about historical fact, though, is that,
oftentimes, it isn't fact at all: it's historical belief. And
it gets revised all the time. My greatest interest as a writer
isn't in fact or fiction, but in what human beings believe and
why we believe it. Who said so and who was the first to say so
and why did they say it? Did they really believe it or were they
blackmailed or conned into claiming they did? Someone has said
that history is the facts plus suspicion . I'd say the same thing
about fiction. The difference is that the historian openly invites
us to check them on their facts, and the fiction writer asks us
to examine what we believe—everything we believe—and
to ask ourselves whether we should continue to believe it.
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PQ:
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One
single sentence that really jumped off the page at me from this
novel was "Yes baby, I love you; now, here are my conditions."
It wasn't clear to me if Bill Lewis thinks this thought is universal,
or specific to our own day and age, or even to his own specific
life. Could you comment?
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MP:
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In
some ways, Bill is the little boy standing by the side of the
road who announces loudly, as the emperor goes by, that he's stark
naked. If he worked at a chemical plant, he'd be what we now call
a whistle-blower. Some think that whistle-blowers are heroic and
necessary and others think they are the worst kind of traitors
and should be shot. A whistle-blower can be an aggravating sort
of person to know because they can seem almost childishly idealistic
and truthful. They cause trouble at times and in places where
we just want peace. In the case of love, Bill can't help but point
out the fact that much of what we call plain love is actually
a special kind: conditional love. It's ours as long as
we meet its often rigorous conditions. And sometimes we don't
find out all the conditions until we've violated them, and then
it's too late. Married love isn't supposed to be conditional,
but it often turns out to be, and doesn't last. Parental love
is never supposed to be conditional, but it sometimes is, and
parent-child relationships fail. Generally, as we age, we accept
this discovery and give up our anger about it. But Bill refuses
to give up his anger about it, refuses to accept what he sees
as a defeat of his ideals, which it is. And this, too, is a clue
to his depression, I'd say.
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