Allan Gurganus

AllanGurganus is the author of two novels, OldestLiving Confederate Widow Tell All and PlaysWell With Others, and a collection of short stories, WhitePeople. His most recent work is a volume of four novellas,ThePractical Heart. The title novella in that collection (whichalso includes Preservation News, He’s One, Too and SaintMonster) won a National Magazine Prize when it appeared in Harper’smagazine. He has taught at Stanford University, Duke University and theWriter’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and Sarah Lawrence College.Gurganus has won numerous awards and his stories have been anthologizedin the current O Henry Prize collection and the Best AmericanShort Stories 2001. His writing is also represented in the NortonAnthology of American Short Fiction. Allan Gurganus was recently inductedinto the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship of SouthernWriters. He lives in North Carolina and is currently at work on his nextnovel, An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church. This ishis second conversation with Robert Birnbaum.

Robert Birnbaum: Tell me about the anti-Jesse-Helms organizationyou are a member of?

Allan Gurganus: Writers Against Jesse Helms. I co-founded it in1990. We were just livid at the thought of his continuing for one moreyear and here it is twelve years later. But, nature does have its compensations,it’s dragging me kicking to the grave, but he’s going sooner than I am.He’s, I think, lost a little of the vinegar and the rage, but every timeyou begin to try to make him warm and fuzzy, he’ll come out with somestatement that is so egregious and so homophobic and so inherently racistand xenophobic — it’s not even xenophobia, it’s — he just hates people,it’s not just gay people or black people, it’s just people.

RB: So what happens to the organization now that he is retiring?

AG: I’m afraid we’ll be Writers Against Liddy Dole. That’s thenext step. It looks like she is coming in. In a weird way, Helms is amuch more authentic human being than she is. She’s a privileged kid whodecided, arbitrarily, to run for office. I ran into an old man in Salisbury,her hometown, who’d seen it all and I said, "Did you know Liddy Dolecoming up?"
And he said, "Oh yeah."
"What was her story?"
"She was always running for something."
And she’s never stopped. And never stopped long enough to ask, who amI and what do I really believe? It’s just like orange are the power suitsand if you can mike me I’ll walk off the podium and amaze everybody. She’san Avon lady.

RB: Will she change her hair?

AG: I haven’t keep up, but I’m sure it’s going to be whippingaround. It may be karmic destiny that she was going to announce her candidacyon Sept. 11 and had to reschedule. Helms at least had a kind of galvanizinginfluence on people. You can get money and you can get people excitedand he’s always good copy in the most horrible way. What’s not understoodis that the reason he’s been elected for the last ten years is that peoplefrom New Jersey are retiring in North Carolina and the old tabaccky farmersare dying off. The Volvo crowd with the silver hair and looking out forthe great grand children’s inheritance are voting in Jesse Helms and havemade that happen. All the vilification of the south is continuing. It’spretty hollow now.

RB: There is an Association of Southern Writers?

AG: There is. Sort of like a Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s a horrifyingthought. I went to one meeting in Chattanooga to be inducted. One of thewriters — he hadn’t been inducted yet but he was clearly bucking forthat — came through the buffet line with a rack of venison he had cookedin the parking lot and basted with thousand island dressing, used woodchips that he found behind the dumpster. I mean, I thought, "Jesusgod, I don’t think I can take it, you know."

RB: We’re not naming any names?

AG: No. You wouldn’t know him. But it’s sort of the James Dickeyvein, the wild macho man from the woods. There’s one of each. There’sa genteel lady who is fine until you get that fourth daiquiri into herand then jump back. It’s a wonderful crowd. It’s a wonderful group ofpeople.

RB: How old is the organization?

AG: I think it was founded by Robert Penn Warren in the 40′s or50′s. It’a very particular society. Sort of like the International DryCleaners Hall of Fame. It’s a very particular and local thing. But somevery wonderful people have belonged. You would be a crazy person not tobe rejoicing everyday not to have been born in the south. The sheer densityof narrative, the sheer capacity for telling amusing stories, not justby people that are paid to write, but people who are earning a livingin service stations and who amuse themselves…

RB: Would you have said this ten years ago?

AG: I think so.

RB: I mean would you have said this? I don’t think thatthe facts have changed. Part of what is driving this question is the reticenceand even the sense of inferiority that I have seen exhibited by some southernwriters. I have rarely heard anyone proudly announce…

AG: If I had been born in Akron, I don’t know what I’d be writing.I’d probably be writing about the Goodyear dealership and how Daddy gotit away from the second-in-command…I don’t know. But to have grown up…we’vetalked about this before…to have grown up in a house where four generationscould walk through the door at any moment. You literally hear footfalls.And you don’t know whether the next person through that door is goingto be black or white or ancient or infantile. Or a neighbor or a biblesalesman or Flannery O’Connor on crutches. You just don’t know who iscoming through the door. And that makes for interest narratively. Andit also gives you that sense, even if your family, like mine is old fashionedmerchant family stock it’s not exactly that we are the Cabots or the Lowells.We just owned that patch for a long time and paid our club dues and turnedup at church and knew where we were going to be buried. Over enough generations,that really amounts to something. For a story teller it gives you a tremendouskind of fossil fuel, a tremendous sense of material and a tremendous kindof trajectory. It’s not that you are endlessly telling the story of yourown family, but it gives a sense that time is inherently dramatic. Thatyou have absolute access to the past, including fooling around with itand pushing and pulling it and shaping it and ignoring it. What I thinkAmerica now feels, all of the USA, is something that I grew up feelingand knowing, which was that history is a daily force. We knew this becausewe lived with the burned monuments that Sherman had left behind. And thatthe sense that the world is a battle field and is important because peopledied here. That is also a tremendous advantage for a writer. Plus thechurch is still extremely important. I live between two churches…I’msuch a pagan. I sleep a little deeper when I hear those church bells gooff on Sunday morning and roll over and scratch and do something lascivious,if possible. It does inform the meter of the language and the King JamesBible is still mother’s milk and I still know every single verse of "Harkthe Herald Angels Sing" and many a hymn. And those play in the workin a profound way, after a while.

RB: Not to dwell excessively on this matter of regionalism, butsome people say you can’t throw a stone in North Carolina without hittinga writer. Why is that?

AG: Part of the prosaic answer, apart from the drinking water,is the schools are really good. The schools have traditionally been verygood. Including the oldest state university in the country and so peoplewho are talented from farms could go to school for three hundred dollarsa year. Now the kids who didn’t get into Princeton want to go to ChapelHill because it’s a gorgeous campus and still a fairly good school. It’snot the Deep South. Deep South is like deep trouble. We are all livingwith moderate amounts of huge trouble but it’s like the racial question…hasalways had sane people saying, "Let’s think about this and let’smake a citizens’ committee and let’s talk it out"…as opposed toabsolute retrenchment. This is the way it’s been done…I was just inMississippi and they sent a black driver — a Denzel Washington type,very distinguished — with a black Lincoln and I was in the back seatand actually went to sleep. And I woke up as every time he was about topass a car, this battered old van would just pull out and block his pathwith out signaling. Like in the Wild West, just trying to run him offthe road. And I said, "What is going on?" He said. "Thishas happened for forty minutes." I sat up and the windows were kindof smoky and as soon as we passed this van, — there was this red neckwhite guy from Louisiana, kind of Cajun with a goatee, looking like hewas missing teeth and 40 IQ points — but when he saw me in the back seat,he gave this big grin because suddenly it was not this successful blackman with a Ph.D., it was just a chauffeur. Then he could let us go becauseit was okay. This happened last week. We are not talking 1938 here. Iwas scared and my impulse was to sit in the front seat with the driver.

RB: This is an ambitious tour for you, isn’t it?

AG: Yeah, all over the place. I am all over the map — my subjectmatter starts in the south — and then gets out. I get to get out too,periodically. It’s not wine that can’t travel far from the vineyard. Ihope. Because it’s in many languages and you want to tell stories thatmatter to as many people as possible. In language that’s…the languagematters immensely to me. Nobody ever talks about language anymore. Peopletalk about gold records and nobody talks about music anymore.

RB: This book was to be published last winter, why wasn’t it?

AG: I was working on the last novella, Saint Monster.

RB: And it didn’t come out easily?

AG: They very rarely do. What that involves for me is cuttingand convincing myself that everything I need is there already. The kidgoes away to boarding school after the death of his father and I had awhole novella length passage at the boarding school. Which was wonderfulstuff…

RB: As long as you brought it up — elsewhere you quote PeterTaylor’s definition of a novella — can you be more specific about whata novella is? Why isn’t Saint Monster a novel?

AG: It’s a big novella. A writer friend of mine was talking about— in a school to eight year olds, about a novella and a girl raised herhand and said, "M’am, is a novella a novel written by a girl?"Randell Jarrell’s definition of a novella is a work of a certain lengthwith something wrong with it. Taylor says, "It’s a work you can pickup at dinner time after you have washed the dishes and finish just asyou go to bed." At least three of these four, that’s true of. I intendedall of them to be read the way you eat a plate of oysters. All at once.It should be that kind of single sitting…a completely satisfyingexperience.

RB: That seems more about the reading than the writing.

AG: It’s very much written to be read and very much written tobe read aloud and all at once. You do that by cutting out the secondarycharacters and the subplots. What I really love as a reader is just tofeel that sense of obsessive investigation that builds and culminatesand really illuminates. I don’t just want to do ABC, I want to do ADJZBC1.That’s why it takes me much longer to write a book than some of my colleagues,who pop out one a year. I feel that I am growing as a writer. I’m 54 andI feel I have really just gotten started. That’s a very exciting sensation.

RB: I have to ask. Perhaps, I didn’t read Saint Monstercarefully enough, but I couldn’t decide Clyde Sr.’s race. All the evidencepoints to him being black but the mother/wife says no…

AG: The mother of the narrator never really knew. She assumedhe was white but didn’t really care. She thought he was amusing and adoredher and he was sexy and it was fun while it lasted.

RB: She was a very smart woman.

AG: She’s very smart. And I think to the naked eye the thing thatwas most arresting about him was not his skin tone but his extraordinaryugliness. As is said in the book, he’s like a basset hound he’s so uglyhe’s cute. He played on it and it became a kind of distraction. I thinkthe way that O.J. Simpson thinks he didn’t cut his wife’s head off, thatwe are all capable of convincing ourselves of anything we want. All fourof the novellas are very much about people who have found an obsessionthat organizes life for them and who then wind up sacrificing life toprotect the obsession they commence to protect them from life. Which isan allegory for what art does, in a way. It shields us and it sometimescuts us off. But it’s a kind of magic that we all require and I reallyrespect the people who don’t always turn to organized religion or countryclub membership or all the conventional routes to security and peace.People who make up their own system seem to me the ones that are mostadmirable. I really want to believe whatever mythology I put togetherfor myself aesthetically, ethically and personally will see me throughto my death. If it can’t do that than I’ve been barking up the wrong treeall along.

RB: Can’t carry you through to your death?

AG: I want it to see me through. My vision of what comes onceyour eyes are closed is pretty dark, I think. It’s how you get there Iguess.

RB: You’ve written enough to be leaving a trail…

AG: It is a trail and for me that is a huge part of why I do this.I am a huge immortality queen from way back. If somebody came and said,"Alan you are a sweetheart but I have the card catalogue from theLibrary of Congress for the year 2045 and your ass ain’t in there."…That’s very important to me. To already be in the Norton Anthologyof American Literature is huge for me.

RB: Aren’t you in some O Henry and some Best AmericanShort Story collections?

AG: Oh yeah and that’s a great pleasure. But that’s the reasonwe do this. It’s not just to…

RB: ‘We’?

AG: Why all of us do our work. Yeah, ‘we’ is dangerous. Mark Twainwas always furious that Walt Whitman kept referring to we, we, we. Hesaid, "I assume Mr. Whitman means himself and his tapeworm?"I’ll back off into the first person and say why I do this. Because it’slike a great thank you note at the end of your life if you can leave somethingbehind or a house gift or a love song. That says this is the best I canfigure out, this made sense at the time. I’ll take my chance in the GreatLottery and hope that this will pertain for people a hundred years fromnow. I look back on things I published in the 70′s and that 30 years agoand there are no name brands that date the piece. I was a kid but I knew…

RB: What’s Bret Ellis going to do?

AG: I know, it’s rough. But that’s the goal, to build somethingautonomous and will fly.

RB: You reread your work?

AG: I have looked at but I have a hard time rereading a lot ofit. I think it’s a mistake. It’s like looking at your photographs whenyou were 25. You think, "Who was this baby?" The beauty of whatI do is precisely that 25 year olds can’t do it. You have to have buriedscores and scores of people.

RB: You managed to use that Jonathan Swift quote, "No wiseman wants to be younger." What a gem!

AG: My two favorite ages have been ten and fifty. They are weirdlyalike. Ten, you are sort of smart as an adolescent, but you don’t haveall the below-the-belt complications that are coming and the catapultinginto sexuality and all that hugely volcanic stuff that’s gonna happento you. You still got some kind of rational sense, but you are also extremelyplayful and as smart as you are going to be as an adult. And a 50, you’resort of 35 — at least this is true of me, I’ve always had a lot ofphysical stamina — so I can do whatever I could do when I was younger.But I also have this long view. It’s like Moses looking into the PromisedLand. And the Promised Land for those of us who are 50 is hoping to escapetoo many debilitating diseases that are up ahead. But what comes withit is a tremendous sense that moment is what you are really aspiring to.It’s not some grand future. If only I could XYZ. Well, here we are atthis table with this room with this sunlight streaming through these windows.This is it. I had the horrible experience of losing an incredibly brilliantstudent at the World Trade Center, who was working as a temp. A hideousphrase. For one week. And had called everybody to say, "Look at theviews and here I am." He was getting a huge kick out of being a spyin this world. When the first tower was hit he was describing it in realtime, on the computer, to friends. And suddenly, it stopped, because hewas on the 102nd floor… I thought, how beautiful to spend the last secondof your life describing something amazing and magnificent. He probablyliterally did not know what hit him. He has a book coming out next year.At least he saved some of it. Everybody right now is living in a stateof grace — a state of "this is what I do have as opposed tothis is what we’ve lost." This sense of intrusion and empire undoing…

RB: You are saying that people are exhibiting a sense of appreciation?

AG: I was in New York and I have never seen people in New Yorklooking each other in the eye and holding the subway door. I mean it onlylasted two weeks, but my God that’s an eternity in New York. I once sawa traffic accident, a young mother with a kid in the front seat and hercar just spun six or eight times and then came to a halt. And the policewere running over to her and she was totally intent on going over herbaby — her three-year old — just working every joint to seeif he was all right. And when he was, she was just hysterical …she washolding, hugging him, laughing, just rejoicing and it was extremely beautiful.It was not disturbing. It was totally recognizable and I’m sure it lastedher for weeks or months or years, I hope. I have that sense about my lifeand my friend. Having this book come out, it couldn’t be appearing ata worst time. 150 friends had a party and I thought…

RB: Why is this the worst time for a book?

AG:Everybody is looking only at CNN and talking about international affairs.But you never know, you throw your bread on the water. Conrad said, "Everybook, like every man, has a fate." Even as the person who wrote thebook and is doing his best to make it known, I know like a mother of twelvethat they’ll get there in their own way.

RB: It’s too bad that there is this urgency to maximize salesat the time of publication as if books were like movies or records…

AG: The commercial fact is that they are only in the stores forsix weeks now. And that’s why they send me from pillar to post to talkabout it.

RB: Let’s talk a little bit about the book. What determined theorder of the novellas?

AG: It’s intuitive. You sit there with them like pieces of brokenglass in a stained-glass window and you hold them up side by side. I wantedit to be a kind of announcement of the theme and variation. All abouthistory wished and history lived. And that’s extremely aproposfor this moment. I wanted a woman to be in one and man in the other. It’slike arranging a dinner party. I wanted the most recent and the longestand the best to be at the end…

RB: When you wrote Plays Well With Others was it the bestthing you wrote to date?

AG: It was a very important piece for me.

RB: What would it mean to say the ‘best’?

AG: It’s just what you feel most fervently for in a group of fourpieces. And you tend to love the one you just delivered, the most. Thisbook is my most formally perfect piece of work. I can’t do better. Thereis not a sentence in the book, if it were read to me, I couldn’t tellyou what it had been before, what I changed it to and why I made it thisway.

RB: So in your numerous public readings you don’t find yourselfgoing, "Oh no."

AG: Oh no, oh no. The only problem with reading is that thesethings are seventy pages long and your audience will not put up with that,so you have to cut it down. Even that is a kind of discipline. You realizethat you know the material so well that you know which six moving partshave to be there in order to make the seventh work. So it’s like breakingdown an organism that you can unravel in your sleep. You get to know thework in a whole different way, like a surgeon operating on his beloved.It’s the ultimate intimacy, in a way. To make a shape and have to changeit. To read it aloud is the great payoff and in a room of 20 or 30 or150 people to make the language return to sound waves and to think musicallyis a great pleasure.

RB: Do you read out loud when you are writing?

AG: I do, I read aloud a lot. It’s a great organizing principle.More writers should do it. And if they did, American prose would be alot better than it is. Most American books are made with about as muchcare as most American Happy Meals are. There’s a lot of Styrofoam. There’sa lot of corn starch. If you read it aloud you are at least responsiblefor those sound waves in your own ear, and that’s a purifying exercise.

RB: When you started to write, did you have it in mind to do fournovellas?

AG: I don’t even have it in mind that I’m going to do a collectionof novellas. What I do is, I get up in the morning and I write the waya bird sings. The bird doesn’t say, "Just think, there’ll be thecollected hits." They just twitter, twitter, twitter and some ofthe twitters are better than others and you get clusters and you see howthis is related to that and then you have the twitter symphony. It comesout in a way, like yard goods, you mete it out. It’s a very intuitiveand extremely inefficient process, this business of writing fiction theway I write it.

RB: Not on demand?

AG: Out of necessity. Out of necessity. The ‘for hire’ part ispretty provisional. It’s seasonal work. It comes and goes and I have beenvery well paid for books and I have also given books away. The great privilegeis to be able to get up every morning and do it. How many doctors wouldgo unpaid just for the privilege of being in the examination room withpatients everyday? That’s what most American writers are doing, they arenot writing for money, they are writing because writing is a clarifyingexperience. It’s a second form of dreaming. It’s a cultural intuition.It’s a way of having the world make brief sense for yourself. It’s veryhard to give up. If somebody came and told me, "You’ll never earnanother penny from doing this and you’ve got to find three day jobs,"I would not be able to stop. I have a lap-top on the airplane, as I amon this tour. It’s not that I am writing a great masterpiece, it’s likea bread maker, I just have to have my hands in the yeast.

RB: Very few writers write on the road. Walter Mosley does…

AG: When you are up in that airplane…if the pilot said, "Allan,I need your help in the cockpit because we are way off course." Iwould not be able to help him. So I might as well sit there poking lettersinto space trying to make sense of things. I’m far from phones, far fromany kind of real responsibility. It’s like being in a play-pen, in a way.It’s a pleasure.

RB: Maybe it could be an opportunity to do basic research, soakingin the conversations and people’s mannerisms…

AG: I’m always observing. Flying over New York today — it’s thefirst time I’ve seen it since the event. A row of teeth with a molar missing…

RB: What was this book going to be after you wrote the first novella?

AG: I really thought only of the validity of story I was telling.I didn’t think, "Gee, this is a novella." It was a necessarylength for one piece. Then I had three of those and I thought, "Wouldn’ta fourth one be wonderful?" And I had one in the works. I have sixnovellas nearly done. I’m always working on many, many things at once.Saint Monster was a short story I have had in progress for abouttwelve or fifteen years. I remember transferring from type script to thecomputer. Every six months I’d get out the first thirty pages about givingGideon Bibles out in North Carolina in the 50′s, going to those funkyold motor courts and think, "This is lovely stuff but I have no ideawhere this is going. This is lyrical, but it’s not enough to be lyrical."One day, I got it out about ten years in, and there was a traffic accidentand the kid looks over at his father, who is this ugly and utterly beguilingand charming sweet man and the kid realized his father is black. In thebash of adrenaline, in the course of the accident, he sees his fatheras other people have seen him. And he realized that this can’t reallybe his genetic father. Or can it? Because this man is black and he’s platinumblonde and suddenly this was the thing that I had been looking for inthe story. I had to dig and dig and dig. And literally create entrapmentsituations so I could tell myself the real history of the story. ThenI was really on to the scent. It’s like being a detective in reverse.You are not finding clues, you are planting clues. But you are plantingthem, to find them. It’s very, very circular and very inefficient. Bythe time you finish with these people you know them in a DNA inside-outway. And you exactly know how they would say everything. They are phantoms.It’s not autobiographical. John Cheever used to say, "Fiction isa force of memory misunderstood." Genuinely — when it’s working— when you are in the zone, it is truly like remembering something14 times as vivid as anything you have ever lived. It’s given to you.All you have to do as a good secretary is just transcribe it and get itdown and polish it.

RB: Are you in a trance?

AG: Not all the time. But that’s why you do the drudge work, youdo the preparation.

RB: Meaning, rewriting?

AG: Endless rewriting, cutting out adverbs and shortening sentences.

RB: What’s your relationship with your editor?

AG:My editor is very respectful of what it is that I do. He makes marks onthe manuscript that I sometimes gratefully accept and sometimes —more often — say, "I see why that makes good grammatical sense,but the fact is I’m 54 years old. This the way I write. If you want tohear Diana Ross don’t go out and buy a Leslie Gore album. This is theway I sing." A certain kind of piling up of detail, a certain visualgluttony is a part of my style and part of what people read me for. It’stoo late to retool.

RB: Have you had the same editor?

AG: Elizabeth Sifton did the first two books. Dan Franck did PlaysWell With Others and Gary Fiskejohn is the editor of this book. Theyare all good in different ways.

RB: Richard Ford has said he would stop writing if Fiskejohn stoppedediting.

AG: Gary and Richard have an almost fraternal connection. That’sthe ultimate. I have that with very close friends who have read my workfor thirty years and whose work I read. It means when they send you something,you drop everything and read it they day you get it. Even canceling appointmentsand across time zones because you know that six weeks waiting for an answeris like six weeks leaving the fetus on the side of the road.

RB: A few years ago there was a rash of stories of national magazineshaving ‘issues’ with stories having gay content. David Leavitt and Esquirecomes to mind. In one of the novellas you have an episode where the charactersubmits a story about a gay sailor in Viet Nam. You also had a problem…

AG: Yeah, yeah Esquire. First they asked me for a story.This was a story was working on. I was in Viet Nam on an aircraft carrier.We’ve all heard so many Viet Nam stories about straight guys from themidwest and Asian girls and blah blah blah. But to be gay on an aircraftcarrier off Viet Nam, I haven’t read that much. It was a fascinating perspectiveon this alien world of being an alien under the disguise of colonialism,trying to police other aliens. It was a really smarmy role. When I proposedthis to the then editor, he said, "You’re really going to rub ournoses in it. I thought you were a pro." As I said in the book it’slike saying to Toni Morrison, "Oh you are writing about black people.You’re really gonna make us pay, bitch." Nobody would say that toher. Every minority group thinks it’s the most abused at the moment. Ido think to be gay in this culture is the last opportunity when you getup and leave the room to imagine what quips are made. There’s a line,"You know what a faggot is? A faggot is a distinguished bachelorfriend of the family who has just left the room." Just when you thinkthings are getting better you find yourself as a character in some trashybook by what you thought was a friend. And you’ve got bleach blond hairand a drop earring and you are saying to all the women at your parties,"I hate you, you are too good looking. I want to be the best lookingbelle at all my parties." All these vampy campy trashy 1956 clichesabout being gay, thrown at you by somebody who is your neighbor and friend.I just think are we never going to make any progress. Forget Bin Laden,we have so much to straighten out. To make monsters of other people isjust more work than I can bear. I hate to be the brunt of that. I liketo have the right to blow the whistle on it when I see it.

RB: I’m not clear. Are you hopeful or not?

AG: There’s been a lot of progress. Gay people have just as muchright to be idiotic consumers as straight people. Î’ve thought alot lately about that George Bernard Shaw quote, "Patriotism is thelast refuge of scoundrels."

RB: I think that is an Oscar Wilde quote.

AG: It doesn’t matter [The quote is by Samuel Johnson]. When allelse fails you see these guys by the side of the road with their littleflags…it’s a lot more complicated than that; it’s both grander andsimpler at the same time.

RB: Where do you live?

AG: I’m in Hillsboro, North Carolina. There are a lot of flagson everything. But it’s a very, very sweet peaceful community. I’m veryinvolved in town politics trying to keep the Wal-mart out.

RB: You are also a gardener…

AG: Yeah, I had to take half my garden out from under my fingernailswhen I came to Yankee land. It’s extremely calming and daunting in thatyou are up against all of nature and all your best-laid plans work anddon’t work. The great moments, I had a moment three years ago…it’sone of most completely satisfying things that’s happened to me, I havethree younger brothers, they are all gardeners. My mother was a passionategardener. It’s just genetic. They all grow something. One brother broughtme red cabbage, which you distribute in the winter…by the time springcame I had these big beautiful beet red cabbages with mammoth frilly leaves.I had a clump of white Siberian irises, that come up with almost pencilsharp buds and come up very fast. These big floppy almost umbrella sizedred leaves were perforated by white blossoms that came up and penetratedthem and then bloomed through. I can’t even explain to you, how mysteriousand beautiful it was. It’s like being a writer, you surrender to the serendipitous,you enjoy it and use it.

RB: Looking forward into the next few years, what’s coming fromyou?

AG: My next novel is going to be a big, big book like Widow.That is a daunting exercise. A hundred year’s history of a little churchthat ends in bankruptcy as a television ministry. I’m doing more and moreessays and op-ed pieces. Finding that’s extremely useful for me and forother people. One of the privileges of being a writer-citizen is thatsince all of us are really thinking the same thing at the same time, ifyou can get it down you have provided a huge service for other people.Just the way all the people of my generation came of age in the 1950′shad the same parents. Because history had put our mothers and fathersin a particular vice between the Depression and the Second War. They werethe most similar generation that, I think, ever lived in human history.Forget the 60′s, these people were maimed by history, clipped. I foundthat if I write honestly about my parents the emotional limitations andthe emotional hunger that existed between my generation and my parents— that the resonance is so immense for other people — they arealways saying, "How did you know my father?" Well, it’s becauseI knew mine. I’d like to think one of the benefits of the September 11thconflagration is that barriers between public and private life have beenlowered for-ever. And this can make for an easier elision between publicand private thinking for writers and for regular people. And a larger,honest political discourse is possible so that literature is not justthe purview of a couple of aesthetic sensibilities but anything is permissible.

RB: Thanks very much.