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Robert
Stone
Robert
Birnbaum talks with the National Book Award-winning author
of Dog Soldiers
 Posted:
May 11, 2003
© 2003 Robert Birnbaum
Images by Red Diaz/Duende Publishing
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this interview
Robert Stone is the author of seven novels: A
Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (a National Book Award
winner), A Flag For Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge
Reach, Damascus Gate and now Bay of Souls. He
has also published a story collection, Bear and His Daughter.
Stone was born in Brooklyn in 1937, attended Catholic schools
but did not graduate from high school and enlisted in the
US Navy in 1955. After the Navy he lived in New York for a
couple of years, got married and in 1962 won a Stegner fellowship
to the creative writing program at Stanford University. Robert
Stone has been published in periodicals too numerous to mention
and also has taught at numerous schools, most recently Yale
University. He currently lives in New York City with his wife,
Janice.
In Bay of Souls, Michael Ahearn, an English
professor at a Midwestern university (the upper plains, more
exactly) who is married to a Chaucer scholar, Kristine, and
whose family includes a twelve-year-old son, becomes obsessed
with Lara Purcell, a new faculty member who specializes in
Third World politics and who was born in the Caribbean and
educated abroad. The mutually obsessive relationship takes
Michael and Lara back to St. Trinity, the island of her origin,
where he is embroiled in a smuggling intrigue and Lara's belief
in voodoo. The backdrop is an American-sponsored coup that
ratchets up the already plentiful supply of angst in the narrative.
The Boston Globe's Gail Caldwell observes:
…we can feel his bruised heart as he follows a woman
to his own ruinous decline. Few writers can summon such intimacy
and, perhaps more important, make it worth our while. But
Stone has always headed toward the blank spot on the horizon,
where either no God waits or, more dangerous, gods with power
but no plan. That, too, is classic Stone, widening the reach
of contemporary literature and bringing chill to the dawn.
Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses:
There is one story and one story only.
—Robert Graves, "To Juan at the
Winter Solstice"
Robert Birnbaum: Can you tell me about the
epigraph to Bay of Souls, the one by Robert Graves?
The one that says, "There is only one story."
Robert Stone: Yeah. I came close to that
poem because of the enveloping snow in it and that it conjures
up the story, a myth that's enveloped by snow, as this one
is. And the only single story is the matching of life against
everything or for everything you want out of it. I think if
you wanted to sum it up and really deconstruct it, the one
story and the one story only would be that nothing is free.
And all stories are about how nothing is free. And that everything
must be matched, everything must be paid for.
RB: Somewhere in the story, Michael Ahearn, the protagonist,
says something to the effect that some debts have come due.
RS: I think he does, yeah. And that in a way that is the
story, that nothing is free.
RB: Last summer Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer
wrote a lengthy article in which he was fascinated by the
Robert Lowell poem ("Lord Weary's Castle") that
was the source for the title of Hall Of Mirrors.
It was a bit scholastic for me, but it led me to wonder about
how much do poems and poetry affect your writing? Is it an
after thought when you are looking for something to introduce
a completed novel?
RS: Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the
epigraph will grow so strong that I won't use it. I had an
epigraph to Outerbridge Reach, which was from Job.
And it was one of Job's counselors, one of his bad counselors,
saying, "You have done all these bad things that you
deserve because you think God can't see you. Clouds are a
barrier to him and he seeth not. That's what you think, that
God can't see you." But it was so much the story that
I put it into the text. It was too heavy for the epigraph.
And sometimes the epigraph becomes too heavy for the story
and sometimes it seems too overwhelmingly portentous for the
story. If it approaches sidewise, it's more effective. I used
to write a lot of poetry. I don't write poetry anymore. That
is to say, I do write it, but I use it in the prose. Some
of my prose is poetry. So I use it there and try to make prose
and poetry contiguous in what I write. I also use epigraphs
that way because I break them down for parts. Not that I use
anybody else's poetry but mine. Except the Bible, maybe. Epigraphs
have a special role. I like them and I use them for a purpose.
RB: You aren't a believer in God, but you are certainly fascinated
with the issues that religion(s) are concerned with.
RS: I am not a believer in God. I have been a believer in
God. I am obsessed with the absence of God. I believe in that
phrase from Pascal, that says—I can't remember where
I used it—I think it's in Damascus Gate, where
he reads somewhere in Pascal, "Everything on Earth gives
a sign of the divine presence. Everywhere we look there seems
to be evidence of it. And it never yields itself to our discovery.
And yet it seems to be everywhere." Or as in the Kabalistic
notions, it is as though God has separated himself forever
and would have to be put together by gathering up all these
items of light which is a virtually impossible task. That
whatever that was, whether it was some kind of physical force,
big burst, or blast we have seen the last of it, and yet it
has conditioned the way we feel and what we want for all eternity.
I think we go without it, we go with this longing and with
this kind of half hallucination that we are seeing it out
there. We want it to be there. There is almost a psychological
space for it to be there, as Pascal was suggesting and yet
as far as we can discover… I mean because I am finally
a pragmatist when I come right down to it. I do admit that
faith is not what you believe, it's not about believing in
a body of doctrine. Faith is something else. Well, I don't
have the body of doctrine. But I don't have the faith either.
Which is an insistence that somehow that things are all right
and as they should be. I don't have that.
RB: And that things are going to work out.
RS: And somehow they're working out in a dimension that we
can't understand. That's faith. I would give my fingers for
that.
RB: Just your fingers? [both laugh] In this novel, Bay
of Souls, you have gone past examining or touching on
Judeo-Christian thoughts to the more exotic regions of voodoo.
Is this the first time voodoo and its various forms have occupied
your mind?
And sometimes
the epigraph becomes too heavy for the story and sometimes
it seems too overwhelmingly portentous for the story.
If it approaches sidewise, it's more effective. |
RS: It's really the first time I have dealt
with voodoo. I made a couple of trips to Haiti, and I had
a lot of conversations with Madison Smartt Bell, who is very
interested in actually practicing voodoo. And I was holding
his coat when Madison was trying to endure the ceremony of
possession. I also got very interested in a woman named Maya
Deren [Stone writes of her, "Her insights will guide
errant souls forever, all our lost brothers and sisters in
pursuit of the light where the world began."] who wrote
a book called Divine Horseman. She's dead now. She
died as soon as she got back from Haiti. She was young, she
was beautiful, forty years old, and she had won a Guggenheim.
She had come from Russia to America. She had gotten a Guggenheim
to study Haiti, and she went down to film there with this
1940's equipment and spent a year down there filming. She
was taken possession of by a goddess named Ersuli, who is
a kind of Venus figure, and she describes it in an incredible
chapter called "The White Darkness." Now what these
figures mean, what they are, is impossible to say. Whether
they are some kind of psychological entities, I am sure the
Jungians would have a lot of theories about what they are.
But they have this power, or they are able to use our power
in such a way that they alienate it for what seems to be their
purpose. I can't explain them. I was just talking to somebody
who spent six years in Brazil and got close to condoble,
and he said the same thing. This African-Caribbean religion,
which is in a simple way, a way of preserving the wisdom and
the knowledge of the dead so that it can be used by present
generations.
RB: And there's santeria also.
RS: Santeria is really the same. The figures are
the same. They are called orishu. What are called
loas in Haiti are called orishu in Cuba
and the other islands.
RB: The last time we spoke, your intention after Damascus
Gate was to write a big novel about Alaska and about
a character who was a religious missionary type. You seem
to have taken a big turn.
RS: I took a turn and I mean, I hope to get back to that.
I liked that, and I think there is a good book there, and
I really hope I am going to be able to write it.
RB: You wrote Bay of Souls because you were stimulated
by your trip to Haiti?
RS: Yeah.
RB: This novel seems to have a bigger ensemble—I don't
want to say of your usual characters, who get into serious
trouble. There is an assortment [even a barmaid that we meet
early in the novel is later encountered showing evidence of
serious difficulties]. The two main characters—one is
an "overeducated hick" and the woman, Lara, is a
"disaster waiting for a victim." It would appear
that Micheal Ahearn, who is a professor at an American upper
plains university, has a good life, at least by outward appearances.
His actions, of course, don't seem to acknowledge that. Why
no match up there?
RS: He wants more—like a great many people, he really
wants more than he can have. He wants life more abundant,
and because he is an intellectual and because he actually
studies the literature of vitalism in which one burns ordinary
life for the life more abundant. Even Henry Fleming in The
Red Badge of Courage is actually blessed, he doesn't
know it. He thinks that, at the beginning of Red Badge,
life has become more civilized and he is not going to have
to fight in this battle and the world has passed through that
stage. He doesn't know how lucky he is. He is going to see
the Great Death and know that it is only the Great Death and
he is going to become in the sense that none of the others
around him, the one who going go to see the elephant, who
will know. It's like that wonderful portrait by Thomas Eakins,
sometimes it's called The Veteran, of a young man. It's what
Michael Herr called the hundred-yard stare. And it's a Civil
War veteran with the hundred-yard stare. He has seen things
that nobody else has ever seen. So in a way, a writer like
Crane, who is one of the writers Ahearn teaches, influences
him philosophically. His life is good. It is rewarding, it
is satisfying. It has everything in it that a reasonable man
can want. He stops being a reasonable man. Look at bourgeois
Europe in the Twentieth Century. It had achieved and was achieving
a state of physical comfort, a standard of living unlike any
before it. It was beginning to provide pensions for old people.
It was beginning to provide for the poor. It was about to
blossom in the arts—to produce in art and literature
the most creative, almost possibly the greatest creations
of its civilization. In the name of transforming life into
art in some way, it embraced nightmare and transformed itself
into a nightmare landscape of ruin and dog-eat-dog and people
chasing each other through the ruins where there had been
this comfortable, good life.
RB: There is a character in Bay of Souls, some right-wing
island strong man who spouts some racist mythology that seems
to express admiration for the totalitarian movement that wrought
this nightmare.
RS: No but it isn't. Because that guy is just…that's
just…
RB: Craziness.
RS: Yeah, that guy has a black Nazi rap. I'm not saying what
Europe did was wonderful. Obviously what Europe did was to
destroy itself. But it destroyed itself not in the name of
anything real. In hopes of transforming life into art and
the Wagnerian nature of both Marx and the Nazis is obvious.
The Wagnerian story underlying them, German Romanticism going
back to Hegel, informed the disaster of Europe. And still
does.
RB: What is vitalism? You mention another writer, James Cabell,
and his novel, Jurgen.
RS: Let me give you another example in the feminist heroine,
Edna Pontellier in [Kate Chopin's] The Awakening.
This is a kind of American Madame Bovary. She is
in Louisiana; Pontellier is a wild girl. Actually, she is
an Irish girl from Kentucky. Her father was like Kate Chopin's,
a Confederate officer. She marries into the French aristocracy
of post war New Orleans. She has a family. She has everything
that a—like Madame Bovary—she has everything that
a French bourgeois could want, a good family, a good house,
a loyal husband (although he may have his quadroon sweetie),
he is still considered a good husband, many servants, a coach,
a house on Isle Royale to go in the summer. She has everything
she could want except that transcendent love. She takes a
lover like Bovary. It really parallels Bovary. Like Bovary's
lover, he turns out not to be much. She has her children.
Still she has her life. Now the time has come to settle for
married life. She has had the affair, and it hasn't worked
out. She has the marriage, and she's got all that, all that
other women around her do not have. She goes, she takes her
clothes off, she swims out in the bay, she keeps on swimming.
She will not live. She will not settle for this. She will
not settle for being a wife and mother. This horrified people
at the time. She thought she was too good to be an ordinary
Southern wife and mother. The high ideal of the gallant South,
she was too good. And the writing is ecstatic and sexual at
the end. I did a book of the making of the movie of this.
Then I discovered they were actually making the movie. I had
to write like a son of a bitch because the movie would have
been made and it would have been impossible. But I beat the
movie out, fortunately. But it ends with her triumphing over
life. It's just, "Screw these people, screw this lousy
life. I would rather swim into the sunset as my own autonomous
woman than be any kind of Southern Cavalier's beau ideal."
That's why the feminists like it.
RB: Interesting use of the word, 'triumph'.
RS: Death as triumph is not unusual in vitalists.
RB: So Ahearn then comes into the orbit of this so-called
"agent of influence," placed there, I guess by the
spooks who do such things.
And then, can we say, things fall apart? Or do they come together
[laughs]?
RS: Well, they fall apart and, of course, in falling apart
they come together. At first it's fun, and then it goes from
being fun to being obsessive and kind of mutually obsessive.
And he wants to have his family, but he can't really stop
doing this. This is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen,
and in a way this is the woman he has wanted all his life.
Kristine [Ahearn's wife] is the second most beautiful woman
he has ever seen. He really has a problem there.
RB: One is steady and dependable, the other is totally unpredictable.
RS: Totally undependable.
RB: There is scene where Lara is called
to a meeting in Washington, DC, to a house of spooky people.
And you trot out a monster [Manilo Perez or Triplemos], that
is beyond the banality of evil. I don't know how many Americans
are really aware of the fact that the Argentines, during their
so-called "dirty little war," would, as a matter
of course, fly people out over the Atlantic Ocean and throw
them out of the airplanes. Here, in our last contact with
this character is where he is recounting to Lara how he would
comfort these people who knew their deaths were imminent,
by assuring them there were no sharks in the waters below.
RS: It's pretty heavy stuff. [long pause] But that's how
heavy it is.
RB: So then we have Michael and Lara ending up in the heat
of this Caribbean's political night. I don't want to give
away any of the plot or story from this point, but there is
a coda which left me wondering if it actually happened.
 RS:
Yes, it is open to question whether it actually happened.
RB: It seemed unlikely.
RS: It's outside probability.
RB: There seems to be so much of you that is committed to
thrashing out these urgent and big questions. Are your efforts
and perhaps your difficulties localized to the specific work
you are creating, or even after you are done, are these persistent
issues that still weigh on you?
RS: You are just making pictures. It's just like any artist
who portrays his dilemmas. And you can make a beautiful painting
out of your dilemmas, but your dilemmas are still there. It
helps…insight helps. Insight is resolving. But it can't—Freud
pace—it isn't a cure. If you understand it you are not
cured. If, we could understand it.
RB: Do you feel better? At least for the completion of a
book.
RS: Oh yeah. For the obvious reasons. But, for the obvious
reasons [both laugh]. If it felt worse I would be a very strange
guy.
RB: Why did you become a writer?
RS: It was what I did best. I always wrote English best.
I always got rewarded for what I had written. I plainly felt
that this was one thing that I could do that—you know.
Some guys had things that they could do that they did better
than the other guys. This was what I did. And that was a way
I could make my way through life one way or the other. I was
in the Navy and I was a radio operator and got the chance
to become what the Navy calls a journalist. And so I was a
writer in one form or another ever since I was quite young.
I worked in tabloids; I worked in writing advertising copy.
Didn't much bother me to have to do that. I accepted it as…
RB: In the Grub Street tradition.
RS: Yeah, I would have been sorry to do have had to do it
forever, but I didn't think it was dishonorable.
RB: I hope you don't remember that every time I speak with
you I harp on this, but because I have always enjoyed reading
your nonfiction, call it journalism or essays, I wonder why
there hasn't been any interest in a collection of that work.
I assume it starts with you.
RS: Yeah, there is. I must do more of that. I have to do
so some more. I am doing some Kesey memoirs from my days with
Kesey, writing a little bit about that. I'd liked to write
about my childhood. So I am, God willing, going to do that.
RB: What about collecting what you have already written?
RS: I could do that.
RB: [laughs] You could do that?
RS: Yeah, I could do that…
RB: You've said that before. But it appears you are not particularly
interested.
RS: No, I think I need more. I get the feeling that if I
collected it there wouldn't be enough, but maybe I am wrong.
It would be nice if there was enough. I have to get my wife…
RB: You haven't kept track, no personal archives?
RS: No, I have really not. I am very bad at that. I have
no records at all. Or pictures. My wife was just saying the
other day, "I'm the invisible woman. There's no pictures
of me." But there is a nice picture if her, in of all
things, Entertainment Weekly." I'm in it as
a voodoo guy.
RB: No!
RS: Yeah! I should have brought it. They should have put
it out on the stands at B&N. Oh yes, it's the copy of
Entertainment Weekly with the Dixie Chicks on the
cover.
RB: Are you still teaching at Yale?
RS: No, I just resigned. Give myself more time.
RB: So you don't have to have any concern about what Yale
might think about—would anyone at Yale be pissed off
that, as you mention in the novel, Yale has an intimacy with
the intelligence community?
RS: Fuck 'em.
RB: [laughs] In any case, would anybody be concerned?
RS: A few.
RB: Really? I had this sense that they were so arrogant that
they would say, "So what"?
RS: Oh well, yeah. That's what they'd say. They wouldn't
say, "Rats. We've been turned." No, they would say,
"Fuck 'em!"
RB: When you say more time, you mean that you will concentrate
on writing?
RS: I may fall back into teaching if I'm healthy enough.
If my back doesn't give out or something.
RB: Are you still spending time between Key West and Westport?
RS: Yeah, well not Westport anymore. We moved to New York.
RB: New York City? There's a restful place to go. [both laugh]
RS: We may go back to Westport.
RB: There are a couple of sniggling questions that arise
for me in Bay of Souls. You observe that the NRA
confuses art and truth.
|
I want to see the
plans of these idiots come to disaster, but I dread
the plans of these idiots coming to disaster because
it's my disaster as much as anybody else's. |
RS: Oh yeah. [chuckles]
RB: Regarding the NRA I didn't get it?
RS: Okay, it's…well, in terms of the NRA, the NRA is
on this kind of vulgarized vitalist cowboy trip where they
all—they all think they are cowboys and they can run
around waving guns, like they are extras in cheapo westerns.
I am also making a joke about confusing the NRA and the IRA.
RB: That crossed my mind. I share your view that the '70s
were a terrible and ugly period but haven't been able to articulate
the reasons.
RS: First of all, the mass-culture authorities didn't understand
what had happened in the '60s. The moguls were still running
Hollywood and they were clueless. All they knew was that were…what
they knew in Hollywood was two things. There had been all
these hitchhikers on Sunset Boulevard, and they had never
seen anything like that before. And Roman Polanski's wife
and his friends had been murdered. And that was basically
what they knew about the '60s.
RB: [laughs]
RS: And they were scared and they didn't understand. This
is when they started edging over to Nixon. They didn't understand
what was going on. The whole, everything began to go—their
sense of privilege, their leftist orthodoxy as left wingers.
They began to feel the cold wind of oblivion. And they couldn't—really
couldn't understand— the art form. Creatures like Andy
Warhol were able to take hold of the arts, "You see you
don't know what you like. You don't really know what you like.
You can't tell this from that." Terrible political corruption
ran through the country, a loss of idealism. The military
was, for example, really corrupt. People would get mugged
in barracks. When I was in, boy, that would never happen,
to get robbed on your own ship. Just never ever happen.
RB: Was that the beginning of the professional army?
RS: It was supposed to be the beginning of the professional
army. I regarded myself as being in the professional Navy
back in the '60s, but we didn't have draftees back then. But
you would never get robbed in your barracks. That was unthinkable.
The '70s were a low point in just about everything you can
think of. The worst movies, the worst army, we subsequently
almost lost a war in Grenada. Ollie North, the Napoleon of
the Caribbean, almost lost that war. Everything was low quality,
everything was lousy. What is that decade in painting? The
Sesquigenta, after the 15th century was really not that great
and then 17th century which is really not that good at all.
It's really imitative and derivative.
RB: Of course, American culture has rebounded.
RS: Yes, America is tremendously viable. I don't know about
this rule-the-world shit. [chuckles]
RB: No, huh? [both laugh] It would be comic if it wasn't
so tragic. George Bush burns a lot of money to take a jet
to a ship that is close to docking anyway. This is very cynical.
That was sort of a question, what do you think?
RS: Well, I think there it is, while he was dodging the draft
and pretending—dodging his National Guard duties, even.
Jesus I wouldn't have dreamed of not doing the military stuff
I was supposed to do. I was just a petty officer in the Navy.
But I would never have dreamed of trying to get out of it
even under any circumstances I could imagine. I happen to
resent George Bush being flown onto a carrier all dressed
up like a pilot. But the people who go for that, God they
have it coming, except we are all in the same boat. These
are a bunch of triumphalist babbits who suddenly think that
their way of seeing the world and their way of operating is
so superior that the rest of the world is going to fall down
before them. And they are going renegotiate, as it were, the
Sykes-Picot Treaty in the Middle East and start it all over
again. I think it's really a terrible mistake. Of course,
they don't have the imperial style. If they had any style
at all [both laugh] but they have no imperial style, they
are just babbits.
RB: It's frightening that ostensibly, Americans seem to be
eating this stuff up. How about the move to time the Republican
convention closer to Sept 11? That's really cynicism.
RS: I find that cynical I don't know why…in the world
outside the United States, I don't think the United States
is going to find too many friends.
RB: Iceland.
RS: I don't think there is too much we can do about that.
Which is too bad. But you only have one country, what can
you do? The stuff that they are getting away with is awful.
I suppose Bush will be reelected if nothing goes too terribly
wrong. I'm caught in a way. I want to see the plans of these
idiots come to disaster, but I dread the plans of these idiots
coming to disaster because it's my disaster as much as anybody
else's.
RB: I had a dream last night that the Bushites screwed up.
And then as befits their characters they compounded the screw
up. Anyway, my experience in the Caribbean and Central America
is that most people don't hold the US government's activities
against Americans. I don't know whether that's true in Europe.
RS: Ah, everyone is different.
RB: What's next for you?
RS: I have to really pick the writing project that I am going
to do. And where exactly I am going to live. I really have
a number of choices to make now that I have this one finished.
I have to concentrate on those choices.
RB: Have all your books been audio-textualized?
RS: Yeah.
RB: I noticed Arliss Howard read Bay of Souls. I
am an admirer of his for his fine movie of Larry Brown stories,
called Big Bad Love.
 RS:
I don't know him. I must look him up.
RB: How do you think he did?
RS: I don't know I've never heard it. I've never heard any
one of them.
RB [laughs] Why didn't you record it? You have a very good
voice.
RS: Nobody asked me to.
RB: You could volunteer.
RS: I could volunteer next time. But nobody asked me. I have
never put anyone of them on. I feel about them the way I feel
about photographs. If I was frightened of photographs before,
I am really frightened of them now after being Baron Samedi
[a voodoo loa] in Entertainment Weekly.
RB: You do enjoy giving readings.
RS: I do. I have a fantasy in which I would like to do a
whole literary program of readings. When my voice is better,
it's suffering a little bit from, I guess, the fact that smoked
a long time ago. I would like to do a whole lot of literary
readings of different sorts—American literature.
RB: I used to think that audio books were a lazy device to
replace reading, but I don't anymore…
RS: I thought, for example, if I really wanted to hear what
the schlock was like—if I wanted to hear Left Behind,
and out of curiosity, I do. I couldn't possibly read it.
RB: What is Left Behind?
RS: It's a part of a series by Jim Van Lalehey about the
end of the world. It's number one on the best seller list.
It's about the end of the world, and Jesus takes all his dear
friends and wafts them off—I made a joke about this
in Damascus Gate—he wafts them off into the
sky. And there is just nobody left but crumbums and semi-crumbums
that wish they hadn’t done what they did. An airline
pilot is flying along and the stewardess knocks on the door,
before the age of armed pilots and steel doors, "We have
a problem." "What's the problem?" "Well,
some of our passengers are gone." "What do you mean
some of our passengers are gone?" "Well, captain,
they're gone. They're not there." [both laugh] How can
you resist a book like that? That's it, if you want that book,
that's one way to get it…
RB: A novel approach. But I just as soon stay away from that
stuff altogether, so far. What’s your take on, for lack
of less cliched phrase, the literary culture …more people
want to be writers, apparently there are more readers?
RS: I was in KGB [a bar and reading venue in Manhattan] last
night and I think it's very vital, even more vital than it
used to be. A lot of people are even interested in publishing,
in a way. Certainly interested in writing novels. The novel
experience is going to be really special in this kind of crazy
—you have to go somewhere to get away from the crazy
media confusion. You have to go to the quiet of language,
of traditional language, to make it mean sense. I don't think
this stuff is going to replace reading. On the contrary, reading
is going to be more valuable.
RB: What's your feeling about your students in the last few
years, their ambitions and expectations?
RS: Their ambitions are great and their expectations are—they
have been Yalies, they expect to rule the world. [both laugh]
And many of them have published and so forth. They are good,
they are being recruited into this literary world and they
are needed.
RB: Are you in touch with and plugged into the literary community?
RS: Well, yeah, sure—I do, I know a lot of writers.
Maybe more than I should. [Both laugh] I go to dinner parties
and find myself at the same parties as Paul Auster.
RB: Thanks very much.
RS: My pleasure. It was good to see you.
Robert Birnbaum was double promoted
in the 4th grade, was on the swim team in high school and
was a philosophy major at university. He has been a night
club manager, a short order cook, an Earth Shoe salesman,
a secretary in a neurosurgical ward, a public school teacher,
an advertising salesman and, of course, a taxi driver. He
has been an adherent of a certain kind of antediluvian journalism
that eschews publicist's lunches, industrial cocktail parties
or shop openings as either the text or the source of stories.
Most of the time. For the better part of two decades Birnbaum
was the publisher of a now-defunct hip and smart downtown
magazine in Boston. Since the early '90s he has interviewed
over 500 hundred writers — from Martin Amis and Isabel
Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn — and read
over 1000 books. He continues to tilt at windmills while he
tries to be a good father to his son, Cuba Maxwell, and a
congenial companion to his blonde Labrador, Rosie.
Note:
Featured author in November 2000
E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com
Writing interests: Interviews, Photography
Author interviews: Dorothy
Allison, Steve
Almond, Nicholson
Baker, Julian
Barnes, Andrea
Barrett, Alex
Beam, Jill
Bialosky, Sven
Birkerts, Amy
Bloom, Amy
Bloom 2002, Alain
de Botton, TC
Boyle, Arthur Bradford,
Frederick
Busch, Ethan Canin,
Stephen
Carter, Alston
Chase, Sandra
Cisneros, Michael
Connelly, Richard
Conniff, Frank
Conroy, Mark
Costello, Elizabeth
Cox, Jim Crace,
Nicholas
Dawidoff, Andre
Dubus III, John
Dufresne, Geoff
Dyer, Tony Earley,
Barbara Ehrenreich,
Gretel Ehrlich, James
Ellroy, Percival
Everett, Richard
Ford, Nick
Fowler, Alan
Furst, Alan
Furst 2002, Anthony
Giardina, James
Gleick, Adam
Gopnik, Allan Gurganus,
Barbara
Haber, David
Hadju, Brian
Hall, Ethan
Hawke, Patricia
Henley, Christopher
Hitchens #1, Christopher
Hitchens #2, Gabe
Hudson, Siri
Hustvedt, Elizabeth
Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor,
Nora
Okja Keller, Chip
Kidd, Anthony
Lane, Erik
Larson, Don
Lee, Annette
Lemieux, Alan
Lightman, David
Liss, Paul Lussier,
Ruben Martinez, Daniel
Mason, Colum
McCann, Thomas
McGuane, Jenny
& Martha McPhee, Abelardo
Morell, Thisbe Nissen,
Sherwin
Nuland, Tim
O'Brien, Susan
Orlean, Ann
Packer, ZZ
Packer, Tom
Paine, George
Pelecanos, Thomas
Perry, Arthur
Phillips, Samantha
Power, Richard
Price, Christopher
Rice, David
Rieff, Hazel
Rowley, Richard Russo
#1, Richard
Russo #2, John
Sedgwick, Will
Self, David
Shields, Peter
Singer, Ilan
Stavans, Robert
Stone, Darin
Strauss, Manil
Suri, Donna
Tartt, David
Thomson, Nick
Tosches, Brady
Udall, Sarah
Vowell, Kristin
Waterfield Duisberg, Brad
Watson, W.D. Wetherell,
Mark
Winegardner, Howard
Zinn (2001),
Howard
Zinn (2003)
Author portraits: John
Sayles, Howard
Zinn, Robert
Stone, Ana
Castillo, John
Waters, Allen
Ginsberg, Carl
Hiaasen, Carlos
Fuentes, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo
Galeano, Isabel
Allende, Junot
Diaz, Joan
Didion, James
Ellroy, John
Edgar Wideman, Martin
Amis, Michael
Ondaatje, Richard
Price, Rigoberta
Menchu, Louis
de Bernieres, Studs
Terkel
Photography: "I
am the Son of my Son"
Journal: "A
Reader's Progress"
Links: Review
of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Hyde Park
Review of Books | The
Morning News - Robert Birnbaum
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