Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review. Date
Approximate.
HB: I have heard you describe swimming as something that
could change a writing style. How?
MO: No pencil and pen, no pencil and pen out there. You
think, you’re more active. During one period of my life I got into the rhythm
of writing in the morning, swimming at lunch time, imagining scenarios.
But I think anything can affect your prose style. It can be
something as simple as how you move within your landscape. I’m sure that’s one
of the things I’ve always loved about swimming, reacting back and forth in the
water.
HB: Swimming is an apt image for your style. You throw
yourself into something that interests you and let plot, structure, and the
rest flow from that initial interest. First you leave shore behind. Then you
figure it out. No maps or navigational devices.
MO: Brave or foolish there is the need to take the first
leap. I’m in that stage now, as I have been every time I’ve finished a book — it
takes a long time to know in which direction to leap.
You know you’ve got to leave shore and it’s going to be a
long time out there so you don’t want to leap in the wrong direction. It allows
me a kind of tension and allows me to feel I’m not rehashing what I’ve done.
I’m attempting to discover something about myself or what’s around me.
HB: What do you need to know before you jump?
MO: I do worry about not having compass, map and all that. I
suppose the only security is having done it before. If you’re a wood sculptor
you know you can sculpt wood. If you’re a writer without that close combination
of action and idea, there’s more doubt. You start with an image or some
character you don’t know. For instance, I read a couple of sentences about
Buddy Bolden and thought this is someone I’d like to understand.
That’s all there is to start with. It’s not light out there.
HB: What attracted you to Buddy Bolden?
MO: Buddy Bolden went mad in a parade, a tremendously
private act in the middle of a public place. It’s like going mad on cnn today. I was familiar with jazz all
through my teens. I wanted to know who this person was. There was nothing
available except rumors, anecdotes, and the driest history. I wanted to
understand his character, I wanted to discover him.
HB: What I found surprising in Going Through Slaughter (1976) is how irrelevant race was. I kept waiting
to come upon the issue of Buddy Bolden’s blackness — after all, he’s a black
man developing jazz in New Orleans in 1900 — but race doesn’t enter into it.
MO: Was that a problem for you?
HB: It was hard for me to think of him completely outside
the racial situation of the United States at that time. I don’t think someone
born in the U.S. could have written about Buddy Bolden in a completely
color-blind way.
MO: When you write about historical characters, there is
more than one story to be told. If someone wrote a book about Bolden and put it
in terms of a racial energy or a racial antagonism or a racial pride, that
could be totally valid. But this was the portrait of an artist to me. Race was
not the focus in that book. Buddy goes mad because of the person he is, not
because of race.
It’s like someone asking me how do I feel about being an
Asian in Canada — it’s nothing I think about twenty fours a day. I think about
music, or my relationships, or a day in the life of my family. And at the time
I wrote Going Through Slaughter, race
seemed less relevant to me than the divide between haves and have-nots.
HB: In The English
Patient (1992) race plays a significant role, though it doesn’t dominate the book.
MO: The way I write about race has changed. At the time, I
didn’t want Bolden to be a symbol — not of race, not of jazz and not of art. I
was interested in writing about an individual, a private individual. Race was
not overriding.
I think about this question a lot. It’s a major issue in
writing today: how do you write about race?
HB: Figures from American mythology — Buddy Bolden, Billy
the Kid — play a large role in your work.
MO: It’s the way someone like Wim Wenders makes movies about
American gangsters. It’s in the clouds; it’s not quite the real world. I just
read Peter Handke’s book about America, Short
Letter, Long Farewell. It’s about a large mythic country and it’s really
quite wonderful. But no American could have written it.
HB: The breakdown of literary conventions seems to occur
frequently in your work. Near the end of The
English Patient you take the reader by surprise by entering directly into
the book, writing about a main character that “She is a woman I don’t know well
enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my
life.“
MO: In Coming Through
Slaughter, too, I entered into the book. I talk about how the only way I
could write about Bolden was through an invocation as opposed to a portrait.
I didn’t want to have to appear in The English Patient. There were enough characters without me. But
when I was coming to the last few pages of the book and the characters were
departing . . . I had felt so protective toward those characters, you know,
carrying them very carefully like little miniatures through the world war, not
wanting them damaged. In the last pages, as I was about to release Hannah, I
surprised myself, writing those two lines in which the narrator speaks
directly. I wondered, do I keep it or dump it? I decided, keep it because it’s
unexpected and feels right emotionally. What I had to do then was go back into
the book and insert two very brief hints that the narrator was present.
In the middle of the book I interject that there is
something about these characters we don’t know yet. At another point, I added a
description of the English patient that could not possibly be Hannah’s
description. There were two or three little prods or preparations.
Technically, the book is kind of odd as well. At times the
dialogue is in quotation marks and at times it’s not. Then it’s a different
kind of dialogue, mind dialogue or narrative. If you have quotation marks
running all the time it becomes very busy on the page. You’re constantly
watching script as opposed to story.
HB: I think of your work as very evocative. You use
fractured sentences often and it feels as if you are trying to summon
something, make it palpable, bring it in from a distance.
MO: It is that. The
Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1974) was a different kind of book, which had
only one central character and was a kind of dramatic monologue for two hundred
pages. I could leap twenty years within a single sentence, it was all right, it
was a one man show. Billy controls it all. He’s almost a stage manager,
pointing over here, pointing over there. In the English Patient or In The
Skin of a Lion there are four or five central characters and you can’t do
that. It would be ridiculous, scattered all over.
In The English Patient
I wanted to go back to the freer voice of the early works. I could do it because
the structure of the story was so tight — one house, four people — and that
allowed me to drift.
HB: The English
Patient reads far more like a novel than Billy the Kid. You call The
Collected Works Of Billy The Kid a novel because there’s nothing else you
can call it.
MO: I don’t call it a novel. I call it a book of poems half the time. I don’t call it anything.
HB: Do you feel links to other novelists who look to history
for material — E.L. Doctorow and Jeanette Winterson come to mind — and who blur
genres all the time?
MO: It’s not a big issue for me. I do it all the time but
not because I have a plan or scheme to break this or that barriers. The issue
of what is truth and what is history and what is reality and what is legend and
all that — it’s not a big question for me. I suppose in the English Patient there’s a lot about
history — you’ve got historians, explorers, archeologists all over the place.
But it’s sort of private. I want to do private history.
The problem for me with Doctorow is his staying with all
those famous people. I’m not interested in famous people any more. I’m sick of
politicians, I’m not interested in millionaires. That’s my only problem with
him. I thought Billy Bathgate beautifully
written.
HB: You smash conventions without malice aforethought.
MO: I do it by divine right! I mean, it’s just not the way
we see the world. It’s very old fashioned. It’s like special stables for
certain kinds of horses.
HB: But it makes people feel secure. Amos Oz gets at this
when he asks if a second rate Ph.D. thesis is supposed to be truer than Tolstoy
because the Ph.D. thesis is nonfiction.
MO: That’s wonderful. I enjoy the security too. This
thriller I might be reading out on the beach is just a thriller on the beach.
But you can’t read those books for too long. You want to be kind of sparring
with a book.
HB: In Running In The
Family (1982) you take a running leap from Canada to Sri Lanka. You go from snowy
Toronto to a land of cinnamon groves, coconuts, and cobras. There’s a figure in
the distance, your father, who you try to summon by every means possible. This
suggested the word ‘evocative’ about your work, as if you are always trying to
summon a distant climate, person or a locale because your life has those
division within it.
MO: Running In The Family
began with unconscious knowledge that I was going to try write about my
father, because he played such a central role in my early life. I had no idea
whether I could write about him or whether there was enough information. When I
went back to Sri Lanka I came across a huge series of funny stories about him,
humor in the Elizabethan or Jacobean mode. Somewhere in the middle of that book
I knew I had to pause, to get deeper. No more jokes.
HB: Some of your earlier work had left the impression you
were more interested in violence than in charm.
MO: There was more violence in my work then than now. Billy was about violence. One of the
reasons I wrote The Collected Works of
Billy the Kid was that I was so sick and tired of all the clichés about
him. There was Michael McClure’s play, The
Beard. Quite wonderful, but it was a language play, Billy the Kid and Jean
Harlow. And the comic books showed him on his white horse — not that bad a guy,
maybe a bit of a rat before but cleaned up now. And in Arthur Penn’s movie he’s
a bad guy but he’s played by Paul Newman.
I wanted to write a real western.
HB: Why?
MO: Because I grew up with Billy.
HB: You grew up with Billy the Kid in Sri Lanka?
MO: Yeah, yeah, on the back of the book there’s a picture of
a boy and a comic book about Billy. That’s me in Sri Lanka about age nine. I
wanted to do my version of this figure who had been implanted in me. Whatever
charm he had, he also had to be cold-blooded. And that’s where the violence
came in.
I was labeled as a violent writer from then on. But I’m not
very interested in violence.
HB: Whose work are you reading these days?
MO: I love Don DeLillo. I think he’s a great metaphysical
writer. Who do you like?
HB: I’ve just finished Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
MO: Wonderful book.
HB: And you. And David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.
MO: Great writer, lovely writer. Do you know his An Imaginary
Life?
HB: No.
MO: It’s about Ovid in exile. It’s his great book.
HB: And for some reason I’ve been thinking about Heart of Darkness.
MO: Let me tell you two stories that may forever change the
way you think about Heart of Darkness. W.
H. Hudson, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Conrad, they were all living within hours
of each other. Hudson was a naturalist and when he reviewed Heart of Darkness he wrote, “Great
trees, Joseph, great trees.”
The other story comes from my son. They were doing Heart of Darkness in university. Just
before the exam the teacher said, “For those of you who haven’t read the book
and are relying on your classroom notes I want to clarify one thing because
last year somebody who took the exam misunderstood. When Kurtz dies, he says,
‘The horror! The horror!’ — he doesn’t say, ‘Hooray! Hooray!’”
No comments:
Post a Comment