“None of my stories really happened, of course” — Raymond Carver on Realism (and Drinking) in His Stories

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Raymond Carver talks realism, autobiography (and drinking) in his 1983 Paris Review interview. A taste–

INTERVIEWER

Where do your stories come from, then? I’m especially asking about the stories that have something to do with drinking.

CARVER

The fiction I’m most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really happened, of course. But there’s always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here’s an example: “That’s the last Christmas you’ll ever ruin for us!” I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober, using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story—“A Serious Talk.” But the fiction I’m most interested in, whether it’s Tolstoy’s fiction, Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, strikes me as autobiographical to some extent. At the very least it’s referential. Stories long or short don’t just come out of thin air. I’m reminded of a conversation involving John Cheever. We were sitting around a table in Iowa City with some people and he happened to remark that after a family fracas at his home one night, he got up the next morning and went into the bathroom to find something his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: “D-e-r-e daddy, don’t leave us.” Someone at the table spoke up and said, “I recognize that from one of your stories.” Cheever said, “Probably so. Everything I write is autobiographical.” Now of course that’s not literally true. But everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical. I’m not in the least bothered by “autobiographical” fiction. To the contrary. On the Road. Céline. Roth. Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet. So much of Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories. Updike, too, you bet. Jim McConkey. Clark Blaise is a contemporary writer whose fiction is out-and-out autobiography. Of course, you have to know what you’re doing when you turn your life’s stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You’re told time and again when you’re young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? But unless you’re a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it’s dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

 

Raymond Carver: Dreams Are What You Wake Up From

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“Drinking While Driving” — Raymond Carver

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“Drinking While Driving” by Raymond Carver–

It’s August and I have not
Read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat from Moscow
by Caulaincourt
Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.

“Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological” — Stephen Dedalus on Shakespeare

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From Stephen Dedalus’s strange thesis on Shakespeare in episode 9 of James Joyce’s Ulysses–

— And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.

 

“I’m Like a Tiger” — A Scene from If . . . .

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(Read our review of If. . . .).

Girl with Kitten — Lucian Freud

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“Wake for Susan” — Cormac McCarthy

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Great find by Reddit user db_usher, who’s unearthed Cormac McCarthy’s early short story, “Wake for Susan” (okay, “unearthed” might be an extreme verb; you can get the story via interlibrary loan from the University of Tennessee, but hey, that takes effort). The piece was published in 1959 in The Phoenix; it’s a bit of juvenilia with its faults, to be sure, but will interest fans of course. Usher’s Reddit post links to a .pdf file; I’ve posted the story after the jump for those who wish to read it on a screen.

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Biblioklept Recommends Five Novels, Some of Them New, Not All of Them German

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I shouldn’t be reading five novels at once. It’s a terrible idea, a symptom of a bad habit that I thought I’d broken, but after abandoning Levin’s tedious tome The Instructions and wasting my time on Shteyngart’s insipid dystopian novel Super Sad True Love Story, I found myself absorbed by a lovely little cache that had been neatly, patiently stacked for a few weeks now.

I’m only 60 or so pages into Lars Iyer’s Spurious — about a third of the way through — and at the rate I’m reading, I won’t finish it until the end of this month. It’s not that it’s slow or tedious or hard work: quite the opposite, in fact — it’s funny and lively, even when it’s erudite and depressive. I’ve enjoyed taking it in as a series of vignettes or skits or riffs. Spurious is about, or seems to be about (the term must be placed under suspicion) two would-be intellectuals, W. and his friend the narrator. They bitch and moan and despair: it’s the end of the world, it’s the apocalypse; they find themselves incapable of original thought, of producing any good writing. The shadow of Kafka paralyzes them. They travel about Europe, seeking out knowledge and inspiration — or at least a glimpse of some beautiful first editions. W. is cruel to the narrator, calling him fat and deriding his intellect for sport. But it’s all in good fun. Or maybe not. I’m really enjoying Spurious and have no hesitation recommending it; however, like a strong shot of bourbon, it’s best enjoyed frequently but in small doses. Spurious is brand spanking new from Melville House.

Iyer’s book dovetails nicely with W.G. Sebald’s first novel, Vertigo, which I picked up expressly to get the bad taste of Shteyngart out of my brain. Both books are haunted by Kafka, both  blur the lines between fiction and biography, both are works of and about flânerie, and both are melancholy. The book comprises four sections; the first section tells the story of the romantic novelist Stendhal (or, more to the point, a version of Stendhal); the second section details two trips Sebald made to Italy, one in 1980, and one in 1987; the third section, which I just read last night, describes a trip Kakfa took to Italy near the end of his life. I’m almost certain that I’ve read this section, “Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva,” before — but I can’t remember where or when. It was strange reading it, almost as if I were experiencing some of the vertigo that permeates the volume. Full review forthcoming.

Kafka was a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague. So was H.G. Adler, author of Panorama, new in English for the first time (hardback; Random House). Another way to transition from the Sebald paragraph above to this write-up of Panorama might be to point out that Sebald references Adler in Austerlitz, a book that tries to measure continental memory of the Holocaust. Adler survived the Holocaust, forced first into Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz, where his wife and mother were murdered in the gas chambers. Panorama is an autobiographical bildungsroman, with its hero young Josef Kramer standing in for Adler, and while it will clearly work its way into grim territory, the beginning — which is to say, the part that I’ve read so far — is bucolic and sweet and strange, as we see young Josef at home with his family. There’s a cinematic scope to Adler’s prose — Panorama is a Modernist work, one where the narrative freely dips into its protagonist’s mind. More to come.

Continuing in this Teutonic vein is Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown (also Melville House). It’s postwar Germany, and Hans Schnier is a clown who’s crashing and burning. He hurts himself–purposefully–during a performance (at one of the increasingly more provincial venues he finds himself playing for these days) and retreats to Bonn, where he holes up in his small apartment and makes angry desperate phone calls (and tries not to drink too much brandy) and reflects on his past. What’s eating him up? His gal Marie, basically his common-law wife, has reverted back to her Catholic ways and up and left him for some chump named Zupfner. Schnier rants against a complacent and complicit German bourgeoisie, spitting vitriol against Protestants and Catholics alike; some of the best parts of the novel though are his ravings about art and the role of the “artiste” in society. Also: he can smell over the phone. Full review soon.

Wesley Stace’s new novel Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer (new from Picador) is a musical murder mystery set in the early part of 20th century Britain. Our (seemingly less than reliable) narrator Leslie Shepherd is a music critic with an aristocratic background who likes to spend his weekends collecting folk songs with other rich boys in the towns surrounding their country manors. He’s smitten (platonically, of course) with Charles Jessold, a middle class composer with a spark of avant-garde genius, and wins the younger man’s friendship quickly when he tells the story of Carlo Gesualdo, a fifteenth century composer/lord who kills his wife and her lover. (Notice the etymological connection between their names?) This tale of murder and cuckoldry is doubled in the ballad “Little Musgrave“; when Jessold and Shepherd find a new variation of the ballad, they set out to write the next (only?) great English opera, an adaptation of “Musgrave.” Oh, and that plot? The book opens with a news clipping reporting that Jessold killed his wife and her lover, and then himself, after the première of his opera Little Musgrave. Life imitates art imitates life. Stace has a keen ear for the period he writes about as well as a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge about music, but he also has the good sense to restrain himself and remember that he’s delivering a murder mystery. I’ve been enjoying Jessold quite a bit, and will return to it when I finish writing these lines. (And, for what it’s worth, part of Jessold is set in Germany).

Frank Delaney Honors James Joyce’s Birthday with His “re:Joyce Rap”

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Frank Delaney honors today’s double anniversary of James Joyce’s birthday and the publication of Ulysses with his “re:Joyce rap.” Marvelous.

Is Infinite Jest Just David Foster Wallace’s Way of Imposing His Phallus on the Consciousness of the World?

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From David Foster Wallace’s 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. I love Rose’s response–

DFW: Feminists are always saying this. Feminists are saying white males say, “Okay, I’m going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my phallus on the consciousness of the world.”

ROSE: And you say?

DFW: I — I — if that was going on, it was going on on a level of awareness I do not want to have access to.

ROSE: Do you still play tennis?

“The West” — Carson Mell

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The Skating Rink — Roberto Bolaño

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The Skating Rink was the first novel Roberto Bolaño published, a murder mystery in Spanish, all the way back in 1993.  It’s a short novel, but full of devices and ideas that readers will recognize from the late Chilean master’s later and better-known works. Characters who populate the novel recount events as if speaking extemporaneously to a reporter or a detective and discuss ideas and themes that the author would return to again and again:  obsession, alienation, lack of national identity, underappreciated poets, homelessness, and homicide.  The Skating Rink is a brief novel at 179 sharp and engaging pages. It wouldn’t be incorrect to call it a minor novel, but it would be a mistake to consider it merely a warm-up for the more intricate routines that the writer would perfect in the future.

The novel is about the construction and existence of a clandestine ice rink built in a deserted mansion on the cliffs of a seaside resort town in Catalonia, Spain. Erected to please Nuria Marti, a beautiful figure skater cut from the Spanish Olympic team, the rink and its inspiration are reserved and glacial while the locals who populate the seasonally bustling city are, with varying degrees of success, just trying to hold everything together. When the body of an itinerant singer is discovered in the middle of the ice deep within the labyrinthine halls of the decaying house, everything the characters have strained to preserve begins to fall apart.

The book is narrated by three men who represent different strata of Spanish society. Enric Rosquelle is an outwardly arrogant bureaucrat in charge of the city’s various social service agencies whose desperate need for love leads him to embezzle the funds  in order to build the skating facility for the athlete he knows will never return his feelings. Gaspar Heredia is an illegal Chilean immigrant who works in a campground for tourists and falls for a homeless woman who never relinquishes the kitchen knife she keeps tucked in her jeans.  Remo Moran, a legal arrival from Chile, has enjoyed success as a businessman and as a poet and is anxious about his own precarious sexual relationship with Nuria. Each man is more or less aware of his shortcomings and they utilize similar Bolañesque (Bolañan?) digressions to explain their motivations and feelings. They come to know and discuss each other in their retelling of events and so become interesting, sympathetic, and full characters.  Enric is jealous of Remo and suspicious that South Americans in general trade in filth and drugs.  Gaspar relies on his old friend Remo for his job and secretly watches Enric coaching Nuria.

The sense of loneliness and the failure to take advantage of fleeting opportunities are palpable. In a number of places, the narrative and the novel’s setting evoke a Wong Kar-wai movie. In slow motion, men follow women through cobblestone streets, not quite able to grasp that thing they desire. Hang-gliders dance in the sky and while everyone else is watching the fliers against the cool blue sky, we’re being told about how she’s just disappeared through a door down a side street. Solitary women stroll up cliff-side highways while our narrators limp behind. I almost expect Gaspar to sit down next to Tony Leung while cellos or Chinese versions of well-known pop tunes play from a nearby jukebox.  Unlike Wong Kar-wai though, Bolaño sees the single-minded pursuit of unrequited love as pathological and often a precursor to violence. The men in The Skating Rink, like any number of other men who populate Bolaño’s novels, are unable to resist the wills of the women they love or submit to personally or professionally. Two men here are willing to sublimate their own wishes for those of Nuria, whose choice of profession illustrates her own desire to overcome the normal limitations of geography, climate, and national history. As they seek her favor, they find themselves acting in unfamiliar ways, on uncertain paths and  unconcerned with appearance or ethics.

Like most of Bolaño’s work, endings (and beginnings and middles) are ambiguous. Readers are left unsure as to what has actually happened and the murder remains (I think) unsolved.  The Skating Rink could serve as an easy introduction to the writer’s more complex creations because it deals with time and plot in a relatively conventional manner. The characters get to say proper good-byes and reflect on the things that have happened to them. Like a standard mystery, most of the knots have been untangled.  But because real understanding sits just outside of consciousness, this reader is still waiting for the feeling that my task is complete. There are occasional missteps, like when Bolaño compares an elderly woman’s voice to a locker room, but passages lodge in your head like slow songs on repeat in dark comfortable places. Like those jams, The Skating Rink might be a masterpiece or something to be forgotten when something better comes along.  It’s short, so listen to it a couple times and decide for yourself.

London Intrusion — China Miéville’s New Webcomic

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London Intrusion is a new webcomic by weird fiction writer China Miéville.

“Part of the Fun for Me Was Being Part of Some Kind of Exchange Between Consciousnesses” — David Foster Wallace on the Pleasures of Writing

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Biblioklept Interviews Steve Hendricks About Torture, Extraordinary Rendition, Liberal Complacency, and His New Book A Kidnapping in Milan

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Steve Hendricks is the author of two works of investigative journalism. 2006’s The Unquiet Grave is an examination of how the FBI aided and abetted the erosion of American Indian culture in the United States. Hendricks’s newest book is A Kidnapping in Milan, a nonfiction thriller that exposes the extraordinary rendition of radical imam Abu Omar by the CIA. In our review we noted that “Hendricks combines journalistic clarity with the structure of a detective novel in Kidnapping,” pointing out that what guides “the narrative is a refined sense of moral outrage against the idea that dark deeds done in the dark make our world somehow safer.” Hendricks was kind enough to talk with us via email about his book, torture, the Obama administration, and the rise of the apathetic liberal in America. You can read more at Hendricks’s site.

Biblioklept: Obviously a lot of work went into A Kidnapping in Milan — lots of research and interviews, not to mention the fact that you learned Italian. What made you want to tell this story?

Steve Hendricks: I came to the story somewhat sideways–less because of Abu Omar’s rendition itself than because I was frustrated that no one had written a compelling account of the horror of America’s torture-by-proxy; that is, the horror of the torture that our client states were inflicting on our captives in what amounted to our offshore dungeons. Reporters of course said that the torture was horrific, and sometimes they went into a bit of good detail, but there weren’t any narratives that went deep enough to make us feel that horror–to make us understand in our gut why political torture is not just a crime but a crime against humanity. So I was looking for a story that would allow me to try to write that narrative.

As I researched the renditions that we knew something about (so many renditions, of course, we know nothing or next to nothing about), I came across Abu Omar’s story and was immediately struck by the almost incredible amount of detail that the Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, had dug up on the CIA, by the ludicrousness of how the CIA went about the rendition, and by the possibility that Spataro might be a heroic figure. I wasn’t naive about heroes. They’re flawed like all the rest of us. But in America’s “war on terror” the villains–both terrorists and our own war criminals–have so often outnumbered the heroes that if there was a chance of writing a tale that could be somewhat uplifting while at the same time being wrenching (because of Abu Omar’s torment) and comic (because of the CIA’s Keystone Kommandos), that was great. So much the better, for the narrative anyway, that Abu Omar was a terrorist. It made the book more gray than black-and-white. In the end, the story of his torture, which had gotten me into the book, ended up being just one chapter, though to my mind it’s one of the most powerful chapters in the book.

Biblioklept: I think for most readers that chapter, “Torment,” will certainly stand out. I found it fascinating, particularly the historical overview of how various governments have used torture (and “ordeals”) to coerce information from captives. There’s a brutal episode in the chapter that describes how the torturers used a cattle-prod type device on Abu Omar. In narrative terms, we find ourselves sympathizing with this “bad guy,” this enemy-other who’s been locked up in a no-place. How important was it for you to elicit this kind of emotional identification on the reader’s part with Abu Omar? Were you concerned with alienating some potential readers?

Hendricks: It was very important to me that readers empathize with the atrocities visited on Abu Omar. It’s easy for anyone to say that lesser criminals shouldn’t be tortured. But for some people it’s much harder to say that torture shouldn’t be used against our greatest enemies. Yet that’s the test–one test anyway–of whether a deed like torture is evil: does it repulse and degrade us even when we use it against those who are themselves in some measure evil? Yes, I was sure, as you suggest, that my portrayal would alienate some pro-torture readers, but I was more interested in appealing to readers whose minds weren’t made up.

I did hear, shortly after the book’s publication, from one reader who said he was put off that I was advocating a moral view rather than giving a neutral “here’s this side of the story, here’s that side of story.” My response was that most of the supposedly “neutral” descriptions of torture-by-proxy haven’t in fact been neutral. For example, most American media refuse to refer to our use of waterboarding as torture, even though if you asked a hundred torture experts, ninety-nine would say it’s torture. I believed a corrective was needed–not an unfair and ludicrously biased corrective but one that reported the brutal facts unsparingly, which in turn would make plain that the mainstream media, by sins of omission and commission, had gotten things badly wrong.

I would add that there are some crimes so heinous that if you don’t call them heinous, you’re either dishonest, naïve, or a coward. Look at it this way: if an author told the story of the Holocaust as “well, Hitler had his take on it, and the Jews had theirs,” would you trust the author, or would you think him a lout? The torture of a few hundred men is not the same as the murder of millions, but international law deems systematic torture as so awful that it puts it in a class of crime similar to genocide–and it’s not just international law, but American law that does so. The United States has adopted both the Rome Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture as the law of the land, and both laws define political torture as a crime against humanity. The Convention Against Torture, as enacted here, provides jail time for people who send someone to another country to be tortured, and if the tortured person dies, the punishment can even be the death penalty. That’s not something you hear much in the media–that Clinton (who began extraordinary renditions), Bush junior, and now Obama (who continues the rendition program) could be subject to jail time or even death.

All that said, I strongly believe that a writer like me who advocates a moral position is obliged to present the facts in such a way (even if he’s presenting his opinions alongside them) that will allow readers to judge for themselves whether his advocacy is valid. I think I did that in the book, but, in the spirit of what I’m saying here, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

Biblioklept: Your book ends in early 2009, where you point out that, from the outset, the Obama administration essentially followed the Bush administration’s policies; Obama has even authorized the assassination of American terror suspects. Over the past few years, the average American’s focus has shifted from US foreign relations to our sagging economy. It seems that there’s a sense among many progressives that our international reputation and morality have been restored simply by electing Obama. Do you worry that there’s too much complacency on the left? What’s at stake in continuing to ignore our government’s abuses?

Hendricks: Absolutely, there’s far too much complacency on the left. Most leftists simply packed up their bags and went home after the 2008 elections, then were utterly dismayed when Obama tacked way to the right on just about everything: on health care, on banking reform, on the stimulus package, on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on torture, and on and on. Some leftists have woken up, but most of them still think that with some pretty tepid nudging, they can bring out the good Obama that they “know” is inside him. Guess what, folks: As he has shown again and again, he’s a corporatist/defense-hawk Democrat, and he’s not going to change unless he has no choice–and at this late date, that’s not going to happen unless he’s threatened with a serious challenge to his renomination in 2012. But of course most progressives, demoralized and limp, are too scared to give him a run for his money and will stand by their man, even if he’s not their man.

I’m endlessly amazed (and depressed) at how little the left learns from the right. Right wingers build power by playing strongly to their base. They push and push their far-right policies, and the national discourse moves rightward with them. Contrast that with progressives, who plead rather than demand and who, when they get into the office, make a mad dash for the center-right. Don’t these people know that in poll after poll a majority of Americans support their (supposed) goals: an end to the illegal wars, a real ban on torture, health care with a public option, accountability for banks, etc.?

As for what’s at stake in continuing to ignore abuses like torture, to my mind the biggest danger is that torture becomes normalized. Ten years ago it would have been thought barbaric to advocate torture. But after the pro-torture drumbeat of the last decade, “leaders” like Bush and Cheney not only can advocate torture but can boast about having ordered it–and face only the smallest blip of public disapproval. If we don’t reckon with our past, ever more Americans will come to see torture as acceptable, and we will have become the barbarians we set out to fight.

Biblioklept: What’s your next project?

Hendricks: A Kidnapping in Milan and my first book, The Unquiet Grave (which was about how the FBI undermined the Indian rights movement of the 1970s), each took about four years–four long years–to complete. So I’m giving myself a break from book-length nonfiction and taking my time mulling the next book. It’s not the easiest part of the job to find a topic will excite both me and a publisher, but the search itself is fun. I get to read a lot of fascinating things, and the time just to think is a luxury. Meanwhile, I’m working on a few magazine articles. One is about some rather astounding health benefits that fasting can yield. Another is about a man who was wrongly convicted of murder but was executed nonetheless. Actually, though, what takes up most of my time these days is a novel for middle grade kids. The book is something like a mystery, it’s mildly futuristic, and it has some political overtones–evidently I can’t keep politics out of my writing. I’m writing it as a way of saying thanks to my eight-year-old for tolerating my many absences, physical and psychological, while I researched and wrote my two books.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

Hendricks: Yes–or rather, to qualify my crime, sort of yes. I once borrowed a book from friends whose house I was sitting, and, meaning to return it, didn’t tell them about their loan. But then I moved away, and the book stayed with me, still unannounced. The book was Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which so moved me and which left me with so many questions, that I wrote The Unquiet Grave as a way of following up on it. I like to think this redeemed my delinquency, and from to time I’ve thought about finding the book’s owners (with whom I’ve lost touch) and letting them know about their honor. But I’m too big a coward. Confronting a terrorist in his own home? Sure. Confessing I purloined a paperback? Too scary.

William Burroughs Plays the Drums

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Girl with White Dog — Lucian Freud

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