Benjamin Cavell
Author
of
Rumble, Young Man, Rumble talks with Robert Birnbaum
Benjamin Cavell graduated cum laude from Harvard in English Literature
in 1998, wrote for the Harvard Crimson, the daily university
newspaper, and was captain of the school boxing team. He has recently
published a collection of short stories, Rumble, Young Man,
Rumble. Ben Cavell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is,
of course, at work on his first novel.
Of the nine stories in this collection, "Killing Time"
and "The Ropes" have a connection to boxing, though it
would not be accurate to call them boxing stories. "The Death
of Cool'" tracks the downward spiral of paranoia engulfing
an insurance adjuster. "Balls, Balls, Balls" is a feast
of male hormone, and "The Art of the Possible" is a day
in the life of a politician seen from the interior. To quote January
Magazine, "Cavell, still in his 20s, may not be ready
to step into the ring with Hemingway and Mailer, but he's a skilled
and serious fiction writer with a very bright future."
Robert Birnbaum: Something caught my attention
in your stories. What is your favorite color?
Ben Cavell: Green.
RB: Really?
BC: Yeah.
RB: You want to know why I ask that, don't you?
BC: I'd love to know.
RB: In the mentions you make of a woman's article of clothing,
they are all colored gray.
BC: There is one other person who has noticed that.
RB: Marion Ettlinger [much-used literary portrait photographer,
who also took BC's dust jacket photograph]? She read your book?
BC: She read enough of it to say, "Why are the women always
wearing gray skirts?"
RB: So what did you tell her?
BC: I told her I have no idea. It certainly was not conscious.
RB: I came to your book based on your editor Robin Desser's recommendation.
I asked her, and she said, "I don't know, why don't you ask
him?" Which I am now doing. But it struck me that it's something
an editor might suggest be changed, because it's repetitious.
BC: I hope it doesn't feel repetitious. I hope that it doesn't
take anything away. I'm worried that you are going to have a theory
that goes with the grayness of the writing or some terrible connection
that you are about to make.
RB: I have no theories.
BC: Okay, good. Well, in that case…
RB: I'm asking because you never can tell what has significance.
I started a conversation
with a well-known writer and asked about her favorite color—joking
around—and she had a serious and thoughtful answer. So once
again, you can never tell.
BC: Now I feel like my book is not thought out enough.
RB: [laughs]
BC: Because I haven't made some statement with the colors of the
woman's skirt.
I haven't managed
to avoid the pitfalls of being a member of this generation.
My attention span is as short as any you can imagine. |
RB: Shall we start over?
BC: I want to write the book again.
RB: You have your whole life in front of you. The fullness of time
will reveal the significance of this penchant of yours.
BC: In the next book, the women will wear all the colors of the
rainbow.
RB: You probably have no control over this, but does it concern
you when the dust jacket of your book mentions you in terms of Norman
Mailer and Ernest Hemingway?
BC: That did trouble me. I thought it left me open—not to
start to use the boxing metaphors in the beginning of the conversation,
since they always appear sooner or later—in a way that I didn't
want to be. It's flattering; of course, I felt a little better after
the Kirkus review said that. That has no connection to
my publisher or anyone trying to promote me—that's their own
reading of the book. The thing is, I know my writing is influenced
by Hemingway. The reasons are obvious. He was the first really serious
writer I discovered on my own and read not because he was assigned
but because I really wanted to. I was a kid, eleven or twelve. Rhythm
became extremely important to me, not using too many adjectives
and never using adverbs. I came to that from him. I didn’t
even know, for a while, that I had learned these lessons. But I
had. Also, for a while, I was trapped by his style. I really couldn't
get out of it. Everything I wrote had this tone. I didn't want that.
I didn't feel that way. And yet when I thought about writing, I
had learned to think only in his words. I had to stop reading Hemingway
for a number of years just to clean that out. It was great, and
I am a better writer because I came to him early and learned those
lessons that are universal. Every writer can benefit in some way
from reading Hemingway, even if they have a negative reaction to
it. But I had to really stop because I was imprisoned by all these
things about him. Many of which I don't find so positive. While
I find his writing stirring, I find it limited in terms of the themes
that appear in it and the subjects.
RB: And the emotional range?
BC: To some extent. Although I think there can be a lot of emotion.
I find there to be a lot. There are a number of subjects that he
wouldn't have been interested in talking about and he didn't. So
we come to Mailer, who is the next person I discovered and was completely
fascinated by. I don't think I write anything like Mailer. A reason
I was so fascinated by him when I discovered him, I felt that having
read The Naked and the Dead that the—although he'll
say that it was John Dos Passos that was influencing him—I
really thought that he was in some way trapped by Hemingway. At
least, to some extent. And he found a way to really break out of
it. I was happy to discover someone who I felt had a similar problem
to mine and had found a way to escape from that and do some brilliant
stuff that was totally his own. But I guess the people at the publisher
know that I am a huge fan of Norman Mailer's.
RB: One expects such hyperbole on dust jackets. Not exactly a disinterested
commentary on the author. I wonder if that copy is written in the
editorial department or the marketing department.
BC: I also had that question because I always felt and still feel
that Hemingway and Mailer are so out of fashion these days I wonder
if it sells books to put them on the cover. I also know that it's
because…
RB: Well, they are iconic even if unfashionable.
BC: Certainly, and I know that part of it isn't from a straight
reading, a literary analysis of my writing. It's because I was a
boxer and I went to Harvard. Here you have Harvard boxer, well Norman
Mailer, okay. I understand that. We were talking about making yourself
a brand name. I have no interest in that, but I understand that
the people who are trying to sell my book are trying to do that.
Everybody—I don't know if they have been prompted by the Knopf
publicity department, but I think to some extent they have—everybody
wants to know about me as a boxer, wants to make this the focus.
RB: That's understandable, this is your first book, and there are
about three sentences on your book cover biography, you went to
Harvard, worked at the Crimson and were a boxer. I could
ask you about your father, who is pretty interesting guy. Anyway,
we digress. Your mention of reading Hemingway early and feeling
trapped by him — at what point did you know you wanted to
be a writer?
BC: I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
 RB:
At the age of eleven?
BC: I can't date it.
RB: Why did you want to be a writer?
BC: You mentioned my father…
RB: That just means that you could have been an academic.
BC: I felt as though I couldn't be a philosopher. What would be
my dream? My dream would be to be my father in some way. And that
didn't appeal to me. Certainly, he influenced the way I thought
about the world. I have always have had this feeling for writing
that I am sure is due in part to his influence and his love for
writing and writers.
RB: You grew up in a house with lots of books, filling up many
bookshelves?
BC: You can't imagine.
RB: I think I can.
BC: It's wild. Unbelievable, almost nobody comes to the house without
making a comment about the books. Every wall, floor to ceiling,
bookshelves built into…unbelievable. But he also, part of
what he is interested in, in his own writing was, as an academic
and intellectual, is to keep it new and interesting. Also he concentrates
on his prose style. He feels that is important.
RB: Another young writer pointed out to me that he was of a very
different generation than Moody and Franzen, etc., and the earmarks
were all about television and this disjunctive flow of information.
That it came in smaller fragmented bits and pieces. Also, that art
these days, especially music is about sampling.
BC: I haven't managed to avoid the pitfalls of being a member of
this generation. My attention span is as short as any you can imagine.
Is he talking about why they, those writers of the generation before
us, might write a thousand-page novel?
RB: We weren't talking about them but about his
generation and why he wrote the way he wrote.
BC: I think for me, movies have a lot to do with what you are talking
about. If my writing is influenced by something that makes me want
to end a scene sooner than another person would or really carry
the momentum of the story through and not want to linger as much,
it's movies that were definitely the influence. I don’t know
how sampling in music influenced my writing. It would be nice to—if
I were Norman Mailer I would try to make the connection between
all these things. I think that it's movies, since they have been
such a big part of my life. I love movies and have loved movies
for so long. While I was thinking about being a writer I was always
watching movies, all sorts of movies, as much as I was reading.
And movies have influenced me in that way. But I am not sure why
they wouldn't have influenced Franzen, Moody and others. Maybe they
didn't grow up with HBO.
RB: One could argue that the quality of movies has changed. But
I don't know how anyone could make an accurate assessment of how
culture influences him or her as they are growing up. I think it
takes some retrospection.
BC: I think so, too. Just as about movies having gotten crappy
in the last twenty years. This may be an easy answer, but it may
also be true— which is sometimes the feature of an easy answer—
as movies have more money risked on them, they by necessity become
safer and then are less daring and that is going to make them worse
in some way. Very rarely do you see a major studio movie today that
is as daring as some of them in the '70s.
RB: I would say that every generation has its own Easy Rider.
There is even a mythology created, El Mariachi by Robert
Rodriguez was made for $7000 on his credit cards. I don't believe
it, but it makes for useful PR copy.
If my writing is
influenced by something that makes we want to end a scene
sooner than another person would or really carry the momentum
of the story through and not want to linger as much, it's
movies that were definitely the influence. |
BC: I don't believe it either. I'm skeptical.
The reason that people are hungry for these stories about movies
that get made on tiny budgets and then are compelling and do well
is because a lot of people want to break out of the tyranny of these
enormous budgets and bloated movies that have to make sure that
they appeal to a huge mass of people. I'm worried in some way for
publishing because I don't think publishing is like that, and I
don't think that publishing will ever get to that point, but bringing
out a book is starting to be such an expensive endeavor I think
to some extent you see that effect. Many, many of the books that
are brought out don't take risks because they might turn people
off, and they can't afford to.
RB: You are right to worry about publishing becoming like the movie
business. There are still authors who are paid large sums that don't
pay off. Look how they are spending millions of dollars on you sending
around the world…
BC: I don't know about millions…
RB: [laughs] I'm not knocking John Grisham and Stephen King, but
they are paid a lot of money, and I am told that they don't make
it back for the company. The argument went that the best sellers
made money for the publisher and therefore they could put out story
collections by young unknowns. Ah, another digression. Speaking
of story collections, the conventional wisdom is that they don't
make money, and there is usually a two-book deal. Did you do that?
BC: I didn't sign for a two-book deal. I think that Knopf is anticipating
that I will write a novel, and I am writing a novel. And they have
a right of first refusal. The conventional wisdom is that story
collections don't sell—although I don't claim to be some inside
dopester.
RB: Why are there so many more of them?
BC: Everybody I talk to is impressed that I could sell a collection
of stories since it’s supposed to be so hard to do. Linked
short stories, maybe. But not the unlinked short stories, the classic…
RB: Well, I'm seeing more of them and I am reading more. Joshua
Furst, ZZ Packer, Karl Iagnemma, Nell Freudenberger is going be
a big thing in the fall…
BC: ZZ Packer and Freudenberg were both launched by The New
Yorker, and if you are going to make a statement about a trend
you have to ignore those two, The New Yorker has this unassailable
place and can launch anything. Anyone launched by The New Yorker
can always get a short story collection published, I would think.
I think it's always been that way. When a TV show hits, there are
a hundred new TV shows just like it. And the Interpreter of
Maladies was huge a few years ago, and I wonder if that has
anything to do with it.
RB: It was published as a paperback, which made it much less of
a risk. Okay, you were a reader early in your life, not necessarily
of the assigned canon. You went to Harvard thinking you were going
to do what?
BC: Thinking I was going to be a writer.
RB: Did you take writing classes at Harvard?
BC: I ended up taking one writing class. I was going to be a writer.
I thought that you couldn't teach writing in a writing class. And
I thought, "What the hell am I doing in college. What am I
doing at Harvard when I know what I want to do? I know all this
isn't going to help me." And I couldn't answer that question.
I answered with a question, "What else would I be doing? Given
that I haven't been able to write what I've wanted to write."
RB: There is that antiquated idea that college develops the whole
person. I have spoken to people who teaching writing who think that
many of their students are lacking in general knowledge.
 BC:
I am actually very glad to have gone. I feel like it has made me
a more interesting person. I am glad to know any number of the things
that I have learned there. And probably indirectly it must help
one's writing. But I don't think that I learned anything explicitly
about how to write while I was at Harvard.
RB: You did write for the newspaper?
BC: I wrote reviews and essays. That's what I wanted to write.
I don't have too many regrets about Harvard. I loved it and loved
being there. One regret was that I didn't spend time at the Crimson.
I kept it at arm's length. I was on the staff, but I didn't get
as involved as I could have and as I should have. It's a very interesting
place.
RB: Specifically the Crimson or any daily newspaper?
BC: Being at a good daily newspaper with people who were really
ambitious. And really interested in making a career of working for
a newspaper could have been more valuable than I made it. I'm not
sure why. But who knows why they do anything when they are nineteen?
RB: Did you box prior to high school?
BC: I learned to box when I was a kid.
RB: Other kids were going to little league.
BC: I went to little league too. My father had an old friend, they
had known each other for years, and this guy, Kurt Fischer, he is
a philosopher and Austrian. He was born in Vienna, and he was partly
Jewish. One day these Gentile family friends picked him up from
high school and took him to the train station. They had a bag packed.
Your mother is going to meet you down the line. Hitler's coming.
You can't go home. You have to leave now. So he and his mother went
to Shanghai, which was a place where some number of Jews went. There
was a boxing league set up there, and he became their middleweight
champion. When I was a kid and his sons were grown and it was very
important for him to teach me how to box. So he bought us —my
father and me— a father-and-son boxing set. And he taught
me how to box. And I use the story in the book. The day he began
to teach me before he showed me anything. He showed me how to lace
up my boxing gloves, and then he knelt on the floor in front of
me and he told me to hit him. Like the father in the last story
in the book. And he really did say, "Hit me, you won't kill
me." He had this very thick Austrian accent. So it sounded
great. I remember that day. I remember he was in my parents’
living room. And he wanted me to hit him.
RB: That was the first time you hit someone?
BC: I remember it well. And he was right, my fantasy then …a
lot of people who have never boxed and who aren't six years old
but twenty six—I've taught people how to box, and in short
you tell them, "I can hit you and you can hit me and we are
not going to kill each other." You can hit someone and it hurts
a little bit and it's okay. Many people are surprised by this. Their
fantasy is that if they hit someone or they were hit they would
die. It doesn't work like that, and it's a very important thing
to learn.
RB: In that last story you instruct the woman on how to fight you,
with very detailed instructions about footwork. You competed but
not in school because there was no program.
BC: There's Golden Gloves. You can go to a gym and get fights.
It doesn't have to be sanctioned. People organize fights at gyms.
Any experience makes you a better boxer.
RB: Does the Harvard Boxing program compete with other Ivy League
schools?
BC: Actually, no one else in the Ivy League has a boxing program.
RB: [laughs]
BC: The Harvard administration has been trying to get rid of it.
For years.
RB: A scandal.
BC: The boxing coach, when I was there, had been there for thirty
years or something. He's great. He's ninety-three now. I graduated
five years ago when he was eighty-eight. He knew if he left without
grooming a successor that they would just do away with the boxing
program. A lot of places did away with their boxing programs, guys
were getting hurt. And guys do get hurt in boxing, and I can understand
how it doesn't make sense for a university.
RB: In the last story in the book, you have a character who seems
to have come close to very serious injury, and it is not at all
clear that it didn't really damage him. At an Ivy League school,
who shows up for boxing? What's the culture like?
I am glad to know
any number of the things that I have learned there. And probably
indirectly it must help one's writing. But I don't think that
I learned anything explicitly about how to write while I was
at Harvard. |
BC: It's a fantastic mix of people. It's guys
who played football and rugby and for whatever reason stopped because
of the commitment. If you play football at Harvard it's unbelievable.
Some forty hours a week. A terrible strain on your time. And a number
of the guys had martial arts in their backgrounds. One guy was the
son of a Korean Tae Kwan Do champion. He was amazing. Lots of karate
black belts and kick boxers. I'm not sure what brought people to
it except if you had quit football and all you were doing for exercise
was going to gym …in some ways it was an escape from Harvard.
It felt as though no one else at Harvard was doing what you were
doing. Only these twelve or fourteen people, only these guys were
doing this thing.
RB: A secret society?
BC: A little bit.
RB: How much interest do you have in the sport of boxing? Do you
follow pro boxing?
BC: I do follow it.
RB: Does it have a future?
BC: I don't know. If my interest is any indication, then no. My
interest has really tailed off. I'm not sure why. It's not because
I think the fights are on the level. There are people who think
the fights are corrupt. You can't watch boxing if you really believe
that. The punches in the fight don't have to be corrupt for the
outcome to be corrupt. Arranging the rankings so that people fight
your up and comer who have no chance of beating him. I tried to
write a story, I did but I didn't like it enough to put it in the
collection. And this even a different permutation of what I am talking
about. There are certain people called 'opponents'. That's the slang
name for what they are.
RB: Whipping boys.
BC: They are people who fighters fight in order to be 21-0 when
they fight on HBO. So those twenty-one fights are against people
who some of them are good, and you don't offer them money to lose
a fight. But they know their role is not to win this fight. It's
very interesting, and it makes it hard to watch boxing when you
know that.
RB: So you boxed, you wrote, you went to school. Here we are.
You've graduated Harvard. Now you have published a collection of
nine stories. What does this book represent in terms of the sum
total of your writing? All of it? A good chunk of it?
BC: A chunk of it. I have written some huge amount of things, but
in terms of what I have finished, this represents much of it. But
there are several things that I finished that I thought weren't
finished enough to go in. I sold the collection when it was seven
stories. Now it's nine, and I knew that I was going to write a couple
more. I wrote one then and finished it and didn't put it in. This
was very painful for me. I did all the work to finish it and it’s
a good story, but I had never had to think about my stories as having
to be cohesive. I wrote each story as itself and never thought about
how they would have to go together. I felt after, I guess I admitted,
that the story covered ground that had already been covered in the
collection. It was really painful to cut it. Really.
RB: You have a bunch of stuff on your hard drive, and then you
have stuff you have finished which sounds like there is stuff archived
that you will go back and make publishable or at least readable.
BC: When I finish a story that is going to work it looks pretty
finished. I really revise as I go along. Some guys just spout for
a while and then have twenty-seven different drafts. But I don't.
It takes me a long time to make any progress, but I really keep
going back over sentences and paragraphs and massage them as I am
going. When you get to the end of something you both have a better
sense of how the whole should look and also I have heard a couple
of people say this and I really think it's true, even though it's
a short story. You are a better writer at the end. Anything that
you write, that works, makes you a better writer, and therefore
you are a better writer at the end of a twenty-page story than you
were at the beginning. Maybe it's barely perceptible, but a matter
of smaller degree. But it matters. Schumann or someone said, "If
I don't practice one day, I know. If I don't practice two days,
my friends know. If I don't practice three days everybody knows."
Maybe someone who wasn't me wouldn't be able to see the difference
just in a short story, but I can. It bothers me if the beginning
is not up to the end. So in order to really finish a story I have
to go back and make sure.
RB: So you dropped a story that you felt was repetitive?
 BC:
Richard Price said that the stories are sometimes manic. I think
that's not a bad description. I think there is a balance between
the manic stories and stories like "The Ropes."
RB: I only see one of them as something I would call 'manic', which
was the first one ("Balls, Balls, Balls"). The others
didn't seem to be feverish and hyperactive.
BC: "Evolution" may be to some extent.
RB: Is that the one about the guys who are going to kill the girl
friend's father?
BC: Yeah.
RB: That's haunted by an inherited insanity. Anyway I think of
“manic” as describing tempo, not a mind set.
BC: I guess I am using it to mean both. Maybe that word isn't as
good as I think it is. Somehow it was important to me because some
of these stories are restrained—it's hard to say what the
difference is. If we use "Balls, Balls, Balls" and “Evolution”
as one kind of story and "The Ropes" as another, I wanted
there to be a balance between those kinds of stories. And so the
last story [that was not included] made the collection veer too
much toward "Balls, Balls, Balls." I don't want to be
that kind of writer.
RB: You're clear on how you think the reader is going to react
to the stories. Your characterization of the stories may be different
than what readers get out of them. Having said that, I understand
you to be saying you labored over the stories, their sequence and
their classification.
BC: Yeah, I meant for this collection to be read in sequence. I
know people jump around in a short story collection, and I do it
too. I want the stories to exist on their own…
RB: Perhaps you should have included a set of instructions.
BC: Maybe. My desire is for people to read them in sequence and
for people to be affected by them in sequence so that you read "The
Ropes" last, having read these stories that come before it
and your reading of "Evolution" is informed by "The
Ropes" when you remember it. You are not just thinking about
it by itself.
RB: I like the stories a lot and really more and more as they became
less rooted in what I knew about your past. “Killing Time”
which is a double entendre about a boxer waiting for his bout. But
I was won over by this parody of the political life. Has anybody
bothered to do that in a while, this kind of mirror of what candidates
think they have to do?
BC: Well, thank you.
RB: You're welcome.
BC: I have always been interested in politicians, always interested
in their internal lives.
RB: That's generous. I think some people would argue politicians
don't have internal lives.
BC: That's too easy. I read a piece by Mailer in The New York
Review of Books trying to analyze what Bush and his people
thought about what they were doing in Iraq—it was before we
went in. And I was a little disappointed—read that as very
disappointed—by the piece because I don't think he actually
did what he claimed that he was going to do. It's important in understanding
the people who I may completely disagree with. It's important to
really try to think, "What do they think they are doing?"
That's important in trying to refute them or to argue with them.
You say, "George Bush wants Iraq's oil for his friends."
You know what, that's not why he went in. That may play a role in
his thinking about but he may think we have all these reasons and
it pays for itself because of the oil. But it's just not true. It's
too easy.
RB: Look, the reason that we have such glib off-handed interpretations
is that political discourse is influenced by these right-wing ranters
and carny barkers who I would not say are the same as conservatives.
It would be an insult to any thinker to affiliate them with Bill
O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and Mike Savage. So people assume
that they are dismissable as loud mouths. The Wolfowitzs and Robert
Kagans and Rices are not stupid people, and so simplistic arguments
just don't wash and are the other side of the Fox flying monkey
rhetoric.
BC: It wounds me more when it comes from the Left. Just as things
that members of your family do and embarrass you in ways that if
someone else did it, who cares. When it comes from the Left and
it's know-nothing rhetoric they are spouting, I feel like the Left
has to be better than that. It's just as foolish to make these easy
claims about Bush and his people as it to say the things that Bill
O’Reilly says. It's very disappointing.
RB: I do think that nine stories are surprisingly diverse given
the Mailer-Hemingway buildup. That languid piece, the last story,
"The Ropes," about a boxer who has almost been killed
in a match who visits his ex-boxer father on Martha's Vineyard and
takes up with this spoiled rich girl. That moved in places I didn't
expect. "Evolution " was funny in a cartoonish way.
BC: I wanted it to be on the edge of cartoon. You'll have to say
whether it slipped into complete cartoonishness, but that line between
where something is still grounded in a certain kind of reality and
yet people are doing things and saying things that you think they
would never do or say, I like that. I like things that have that
tension in them between the real and the cartoonish. But if it really
becomes a cartoon, then I have failed in what I was trying to do.
RB: Then there the two set pieces, the dinner scene in restaurant
with young man, his girl, and his father and father's friend was
compelling. And "Killing Time" was a meditation and double
meaning title of a boxer getting ready for a fight. No real action
in either story. The boxer is just waiting…
BC: I am not sure whether I knew when I began to write that there
wasn't going to be a fight. Although somewhere I knew. What's interesting
to me is what leads up to the fight. If you see this hour of these
two guys in the ring together, you don't get enough of a sense of
what's going on. That's all you see, right? But you haven't seen
the preparation, and most stories about boxing—it's not surprising—focus
on the fight itself.
RB: I don't know that I have read anything other than Leonard Gardner's
Fat City. As long as I am thinking about it do you have
a favorite boxing movie?
I like things that
have that tension in them between the real and the cartoonish. |
BC: I love Raging Bull. I really like
The Harder They Fall. It's a little bit campy, but Rod
Steiger plays this completely amoral boxing promoter and Humphrey
Bogart is his press man and they have blown up this boxer Toro,
the Butcher of the Pampas, something like that. Bogart creates these
exaggerated stories and Toro's trainer is played by Jersey Joe Walcott.
Bogart tries to tell him [Toro] he was not who they said he was.
Toro won't believe it. And Bogart sends everybody out of the hotel
room and calls Walcott in and he says, "Show him." And
it's great, Walcott says, "I don't want to." And Bogart
says "Do you like him?" and Walcott says, “Yeah,
I like him.” Bogart says, "Show him, he thinks he can
win. " So Walcott hits him and knocks him down.
RB: Okay, you have your first book published, how do you feel about
where you are now?
BC: It's funny. For one thing—this is probably a terrible
thing to say when you have had a book published and you no longer
have to struggle to get it published—there are a number of
pressures on your work that weren't there before. Now you have to
contend with the world's response to your work in a way that you
didn't before. It was protected before.
RB: Well, you were anonymous before.
BC: I was anonymous and hated it.
RB: [laughs]
BC: But also I was allowed by it to do certain things that are
harder now. What I have to do is continue to write as though the
only opinion that matters is mine because finally that is really
the only opinion that I can completely trust. I wanted to have a
career as a writer and I am embarked on it now. How can I not feel
good about that now? And I do. My desire is for the novel to be
better than this book, and I don't know whether it will be. I want
every book to be better than the last one. I am into the novel now.
I can see the end. That's great. I suppose one fear that I had after
I sold this book was that I was going to have a lot of trouble writing
the next book. It really makes it harder to write—to be involved
in this process of thinking and worrying about your book coming
out. But I really have moved through the novel. I work more slowly
than I used to. Which bothers me.
RB: You have a book out, and you are working on the next book,
you're a writer now.
Tape Ends.
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Posted:
August 25, 2003
