Marcelle Clements
Author
of
Midsummer talks with Robert Birnbaum
Marcelle Clements was born in Paris in 1948 and came to New York
ten years later. She attended Bard College and graduated with a
degree in music. She returned to Paris in the early Seventies and
wrote for Paris Metro. She has published a novel, Rock
Me, a collection of essays, The Dog is Us: And Other Observations,
and a non-fiction book, The Improvised Woman: Reinventing Single
Life, and her latest novel, Midsummer. She has also
written extensively on a wide range of subjects for The New
York Times, Newsday, The Washington Post, Esquire, Elle, Ms., Rolling
Stone, Vanity Fair and The Village Voice among others.
Marcelle Clements lives in New York and is busy thinking and writing.
Midsummer is set at a large estate on the Hudson River
rented out by a wealthy absentee landlord complete with a cook and
lovely landscape. The story brings together, for eight summer weeks,
an odd amalgam of house-mates from New York City: Susie, a theatrical
costume designer, her friend Kay, an introspective writer, artist
Dodge, an ex-lover of Susie's, Ron, a neurotic comedian, Elise,
a struggling artist and Susie's twenty-four-year-old son. Here's
Michael Cunningham praise, "Midsummer is a novel of
haunting beauty almost terrifyingly acute perceptions. By the time
I reached the book's subtle, devastating closing lines, I actually
gasped at Clements' command of comedy and pathos and her ability
to chart their intermingling."
Robert Birnbaum: My sense of you from my limited
research is that you are a woman of many parts. And now you have
written your second novel. Why did you write Midsummer?
Marcelle Clements: Midsummer is actually
a book that I started around 1990 and I published a non-fiction
book in that time. I assume that non-fiction is one of the other
parts that you are referring to, and it's a weird zig zaggy way
to proceed about things. But writing fiction is what I always wanted
to do. I got side tracked into journalism and since I started writing
professionally I have been sidetracked over and over again.
RB: [laughs]
MC: There are many things about journalism I love, and it is certainly
more lucrative. Actually, I began this book immediately after I
finished my first novel. And then in the middle, for several years,
I was rudely interrupted by life. This was somewhat interesting,
actually. Because when I took it up again a few years ago, I had
to deal with characters who were ten years younger than I was—which
was hard but as it turned out not impossible. But, yes, I always
wanted to be a novelist. I moved to New York when I was ten and
then moved back to Paris where I was born. And I became a journalist
there, by accident, working for something called the Paris Metro,
a bi-cultural publication.
RB: Meaning French and American?
MC: French and American. It was an expatriate publication so it
was about Paris but it was in English and published by young Americans.
RB: Was this about the time of the May riots and Danny the Red?
MC: Later, this was in the mid-seventies. Things had calmed down
but Paris was very animated. As I say I got into it by accident,
feeling I was slumming, but I became hooked almost right away. Also
I would never have become a journalist in New York because it was
too hard and too humiliating, as I discovered when I came back here
to the States a few years later. In Paris they let me, on this little
paper, do all sorts of things. So by the time I left Paris it was
too late…
RB: How did you get the living room, the space, to be able to write
this novel? Or finish it?
MC: It's really all I thought about, even during the years that
I stopped. I felt unfinished and guilty and unhappy all the time
because I hadn't finished it.
RB: When you talked to close friends and they asked, "What
are you doing?" what did you say?
MC: All my close friends knew that was the situation. And, of course,
I published a very large-in-size book in the middle of it.
RB: The Impossible Woman?
MC: The impossible is good but it's The Improvised Woman.
Some people said The Impoverished Woman. I guess
she is impossible and impoverished, The Improvised Woman,
which is a non-fiction book about single women. In a way, it treated
some of the same themes as Midsummer does. Anyway it was a mistake.
I was badly advised for one thing.
RB: To write the book?
MC: To do the non-fiction book. As I now know, I hope not too late,
that really, there is a [writer's] trajectory and one needs to follow
it.
RB: It's never too late.
MC: Right!
RB: [laughs] Right?
MC: I hope so.
RB: I know—people keep telling me to have a nice day. I wasn't
trying to be glib. There were a few things you said that I wanted
to stop for but it's your show…
MC: I'm always glad to detour.
RB: Do you feel better now?
That's really the
best moment, when you're holding the book object in your hands.
Because, of course, the experience of publishing a book is
so, umm, shall we say, mixed. |
MC: I am so relieved, yes.
RB: Not exactly what I asked you.
MC: Do I feel good? No, I am in a state of quest for something
else.
RB: Did you feel good at any moment?
MC: Yes.
RB: When you received the first copy of this book?
MC: Yes. That's really the best moment, when you're holding the
book object in your hands. Because, of course, the experience of
publishing a book is so, umm, shall we say, mixed.
RB: You mentioned you got bad advice. Will you elaborate on that?
MC: To do the non-fiction book. I needed to support myself—
there was that detail, but in the end, even financially, it was
actually disastrous for me. I balked at writing The Improvised
Woman so then I took a long time [writing it]. I spent the
advance and I had to do journalism to support the other book. It
was insane, and I would never do that again.
RB: It strikes me that you have this distinctly non-American attitude
about writing, more in the Grub Street tradition, where you find
any kind of writing honorable.
MC: I've had a lot of problems because of it. It's much more unusual
here. Although I think it may be becoming more common. There is
a tradition in Europe of writers wearing several hats. It's much
less so here. I think reviewers here are convinced that they need
to take you down if you enter into another genre, and it's really
too bad because everyone has several gardens in their brain that
they need to tend in different ways.
RB: I think it's odd considering the big impulse in America to
reinvent oneself. I guess you can change serially but not simultaneously.
MC: You are often not allowed to do things that make things not
clear.
RB: [laughs]
MC: That's one problem. So if you are addicted to complexity you
have to find ways to manage that problem. Also, there are different
kinds of journalism. There was a kind of journalism that was being
practiced in the mid and late '70s which is now sometimes—this
is so pitiful—actually referred to as 'literary journalism.'
But it was journalism, these really long and subjective pieces with
interesting style experiments and I loved doing those. They have
disappeared, unfortunately. At least in magazines. A little of that
has survived in book form. These days the demarcation lines have
faded quite a bit. Within non-fiction there are many people doing
interesting things in book form. Sometimes it's denigratingly referred
to as new journalism. There is a certain kind of journalism that
used to be published in magazines and in some newspapers and that
has basically disappeared.
RB: Give me an example?
MC: Like the old Esquire.
RB: Before Chris Whittle and the Nashville gang.
MC: Yes, long before.
RB: Didn't Whittle bring Clay Felker to Esquire? Which
I think was a good thing.
MC: Yes, I did too. I have always been a big fan of his. In fact,
I was really lucky. Shortly after I came back to New York someone
introduced me to him and I picked up the phone one day and it was
Clay Felker and I remember I thought someone was playing a joke
on me. "Hi, this is Clay Felker and I'd like you to write for
me." At that point he was at the Daily News. I know
this is a digression. He had some story ideas for me. When I came
in we started talking about other things, and he saw that I was
on Mars because I was recently arrived from Paris and he saw that
I didn't have all these tidy categories yet. I didn't know any better
than to tell him what I was thinking about and what I had been seeing.
So he had me write a piece about some friends of mine and myself.
We talked about maybe thirty five hundred words, and I came in several
months later with sixty five thousand words.
RB: [laughs]
MC: And he printed. He printed it as a series in the Daily
News. That was amazing.
RB: Gone are the days.
MC: Oh boy, are they ever.
RB: That won't happen again anytime soon. I thought at some point
we would get to the decline of civilization and journalism.
MC: And here we are.
RB: But the conversation could end depressingly on that note. I
have to remark I was looking at Romenesko's
web site, and I saw one of the links was to Tina Brown London
Times column talking about Bonnie Fuller's success. So besides
wondering who cares, I wondered why they were paying Brown money
to write this drivel. Okay. So let's talk about Midsummer.
MC: Yes.
RB: I am tempted to call your book a New York book. How much would
somebody who lives in a city west of Philadelphia and east of LA
understand the cultural references and the glibness and the exchanges
between the characters?
 MC:
I think what you say is true, but it also can be thought of as a
very French book translated into English. There is a lot of surface
language play, which can be, you can understand the references or
just watch the play. I don't think you need to understand all the
references. It's a surface and what's going on underneath the dialogue,
which I hope emanates from it very clearly, is more important than
the specifics. These are characters who obviously are much invested
in understanding what is going on in the culture. Even though that
inevitably leads them to see that they understand nothing.
RB: Maybe it would really be a New York book if the summerhouse
were in the Hamptons?
MC: Right. Yes, actually.
RB: But the fact that you isolated the characters and they have
to deal with each other makes it something different.
MC: Absolutely. This in a weird way—not in a weird way but
in a secret way—this book was part, for me, of a series. Sometimes
I have the fantasy of writing what would be like the Balzac books
or the Zola books, a series of interlocking novels about New York
and in fact there is a character from my first novel who makes an
appearance in this novel, though it's not indicated. They are very
much New Yorkers and part of what I was interested in describing
was New York and for that I had to take them out of New York, which
is so distracting. But it's true that they would have to make and
have those references and I hope people don't dislike them because
of the references. I know these days some people dislike New York.
RB: These days?
MC: Maybe you're right.
RB: I am not suggesting it's a New York book like The Devil
Wears Prada is a New York book.
MC: I wouldn't feel comfortable writing about rustic characters,
I don't really understand them. Although, I am interested. But I
couldn't have more than one of two.
RB: Aren't writers supposed to be able to put themselves into every
kind of character? On the other hand feeling comfortable with your
material is important.
MC: I had things I felt compelled to say. It was also partly the
relationships and the characters that came to mind that embodied
them. Although they are very different. They are disparate New York
types. They are not all the same. Not all downtown hipsters. There
is one very WASPy…
RB: Kay? Isn't she a hipster by virtue of being a writer?
MC: Exactly. She could pass, but in the end she has some discomfort
[long pause]. I could have said more about that. I wasn't finished
[with that].
RB: It seemed like there was a potential for this story to go on
and in the novel you actually set up that possibility by suggesting
that there would be some kind of post-Summer reunion dinner.
MC: I forgot that.
RB: It's a character-driven story, so it does seem that more can
be said. Did I read correctly about you that you started reading
Balzac when you were ten?
MC: You know, because French children…
RB: No need to apologize.
MC: …read a lot of 19th century novels, and I was addicted
very early to Balzac and to Zola and others of that ilk. Actually,
I majored in music in school. I remember bringing my composition
teacher in college some songs and he said, "I can't believe
how French these sound." By then I was eighteen, nineteen,
eight or nine years after I had arrived in this country. The chassis
of this book feels to me more French. And, of course, these days
people dislike French people even more then they dislike New Yorkers,
so that doesn't necessarily help.
RB: We don't care about other people. Do we?
MC: We do. We don't necessarily act on our caring.
RB: Who are 'people'?
MC: You know, the horrifying introjects that one imagines or haranguing
critiquing. I would actually like people, readers to like these
characters. Not everyone does. I made some of them, very self-indulgent
or narcissistic or self-involved. Some of my favorite people are
like that.
RB: Was your sympathy and compassion extended to all of them? Like
the young au pair?
MC: I even liked her. I really liked her. That was one of the big
differences taking this book up again ten years later because I
was much more snide when I began it. I was much more sarcastic.
And I felt much more compassion toward all of them. I felt sorry
for them when I finished the novel in a way I don't think I could
have if I had finished within a year or two.
RB: Why did you feel sorry for them?
MC: For example there is one very obnoxious guy, Ron. He's a comedian
and is basically crazy and who is very aggressive and abrasive.
He was the kind of person who I would experience, as very...I would
be very unsettled when someone like that was around. Now I feel
bad for him. And in fact he was a worse guy in the first draft then
he is in the last draft. He locates some humanity within himself.
That's why I, in a way, try not to spend too much time having regrets—for
one thing then I would spend all my time that way—for another
there were advantages in stopping and starting and it's a better
book than it would have been than if I had just gone straight through.
RB: I am beginning to understand the euphoric moment and the settling
in of reality for you. You really want to write novels, and it's
a really hard thing to do. So you are struggling within yourself
on how you will be able to write the next one.
MC: Yeah, exactly. Most of it is practical. If there were no practical
considerations, I would write three or fours novels right now. It's
not that I would want to drop the other stuff, but that's what I
would want to do. I think that I would get to be a better novelist.
RB: Are we both assuming that this well-crafted novel that you
have written is not going to be a bestseller and therefore a solution
to all your problems?
MC: That would be a solution to all my problems.
RB: Why are we making that assumption?
MC: I've never had reason to make the opposite assumption. I'm
really happy that it was published. And I am delighted that it's
still alive three months after the publication. My first novel came
and went so fast that I understand what the stakes are and how fast
that happens. I am really happy that this one is faring so much
better. But a bestseller? I don't think it's a bestseller kind of
book. One of the reasons I write non-fiction is to take the pressure
off myself in terms of, so I don't have to have any commercial considerations
when I write fiction. Because that winds up preventing me from writing
at all. I just can't do it. It's not that I think there's anything
wrong with it. It's that I can't accommodate both. What I love the
most about writing fiction is the kind of free fall and if I am
worried about covering this and that it doesn't really work for
me. I guess there is that too.
RB: Are there places that you could still write for other than
the New York Times?
There is a tradition
in Europe of writers wearing several hats. It's much less
so here. I think reviewers here are convinced that they need
to take you down if you enter into another genre, and it's
really too bad because everyone has several gardens in their
brain that they need to tend in different ways. |
MC: I have continued to write for the Arts &
Leisure section and I write about movies for them. I am working
on a proposal for a book which is half memoir and half reportage—one
of those books that really isn't in any category.
RB: Which is the way it should be.
MC: Yes, yes. I remember my former agent saying, "You need
to write a book that the bookstore owners will know what shelf to
put them on."
RB: High concept.
MC: Perversely I never seem to do that. I am thinking of writing
a book called 1958. That would really be about the year
I came to New York.
RB: Okay you can write for the Times. Any place else?
MC: Maybe. Magazines, here and there.
RB: What are magazines that you think you could write for? Where
you won't be asked to profile the latest twenty-year-old who allegedly
made a movie maxing out his credit card or saving the lunch money.
MC: I don't know yet, so we are going to have to patch this in,
three months from now [laughs].
RB: There is talk that the Guardian is launching an American
weekly magazine. That's an interesting signal in cultural noisemaking.
MC: It does seem that to me too. And they have given me good reviews
in the past. If I have to I can write things…there is honest
work…there is a certain kind of dishonest work I can't do,
because it ruins me. It ruins my mind. But there is an honest journalistic
work that I can do even though it's not the work I would want to
be doing to make money. It doesn't screw you up. It doesn't twist
you into something than you can't…I do wish things were different.
The first draft of this book was finished on June 8, 1994 and I
stopped for a few years after that. My son was born on June 11,
1994. It's not a coincidence I knew what I was getting in to and
what it would mean. And I am not sorry.
RB: I looked at your collection of essays, The Dog is Us,
that was published in 1985. The first essay is about what you called
the "mutant elite." I looked to see if it had been published
previously. Had you tried to sell that piece to someone? And did
you think that anyone would publish it?
MC: I don't think so. Since then it has been in college textbooks.
That book had a very weird genesis. Half the pieces were published,
though in very different forms, in various magazines. I was having
so much trouble with editors—they were giving me such a hard
time because my writing seemed weird. After the book was published
I had a much easier time and some of these pieces which were rejected,
the very same editors who were rejecting my work then asked me to
do things for them. It's interesting how much effect the authority
of the printed page has. Especially the book. Also, it used to happen
to me that people would see things published in another magazine
and call me and then I would hand in a piece that was at least of
the same quality of what they had seen and it looked weird to them.
It looked wrong, somehow. So there are a few like that, and there
was all this stuff that I wanted to write that I couldn't get published.
So I wrote it for the book.
RB: And the piece on Nicaragua didn't appear in a magazine. Did
you sell parts of it anywhere?
MC: A shrunken-down version appeared in Rolling Stone.
But there were so many arguments about it I took my name off it.
RB: [laughs]
MC: I put the byline Odette Swann on it and amazingly somebody
must have read Proust in the copyediting department at Rolling
Stone because they changed it to Carol Swan.
RB: How or why did they screw up the piece?
MC: I heard someone say I had gotten this great interview with
this Nicaraguan woman Sandanista, but they didn't want any of my
ruminations. It was at a time there was a very different kind of
thinking on Central America.
RB: Rolling Stone was publishing William Greider on Nicaragua.
MC: Exactly and he had a considerably more centrist position than
I did. Also, he was an older, more established figure and someone
they were comfortable with. Not long after this book was published
I went back to Nicaragua, where I wrote several pieces for the Voice.
Some were published and some were not. They couldn't believe some
of the things I reported on and brought back to them. They were
eventually front-page stories in the New York Times years
later.
RB: Paul Berman was writing on Nicaragua for the Voice
in that period.
MC: Yes. I went back a few times around 1985. I was just fascinated.
RB: I went there in 1989.
MC: Andrew Kopkind was the one who I first went there with. He
and I were very close friends. I was having dinner with him one
night and he said, "I'm going to Nicaragua tomorrow morning."
And he saw my expressions and said, "Do you want to come along?"
It was unbelievable. At that point he was working at the Nation
and Hamilton Fish, who is also a friend, helped out and got me a
visa. It was incredible. I was on the plane the next day.
 RB:
I recently spoke to Joseph O’Connor, an Irish novelist, who
went to Nicaragua in 1985. We probably bored a lot of readers in
our discussion of this place that some snooty State Department type
referring to Managua Nicaragua said sounded like a typographical
error.
MC: There was such resistance.
RB: No one seemed to care or knew much about it.
MC: There was resistance from the right, from conservatives and
from the so-called Left, which by then was what was left of the
Left.
RB: The remaining Left.
MC: Yeah. In fact that was a key issue because the Nation
went much more to the center. But anyway, you may not want to bore
people again. I remember that I started just keeping my mouth shut.
RB: I think we should assemble a group of people who were there
in the '80s and have someone fund a filmic reunion.
MC: Of course, I think that's a great idea.
RB: I guarantee you we are not alone.
MC: I don't think we are. But it was very hard to convey that experience
because there was such heavy propaganda in the opposite direction.
It was impossible to convey to people how attractive the Nicaraguans
were. Especially since all you would see on the front page of the
New York Times —I don't even know how they got that
many horrible shots of Daniel Ortega—who was this incredibly
shy person. And they would always get these weird shots of him with
his glasses askew, looking like a maniac. It was really too bad.
RB: Is there some entity that would find it worthy to do that story,
and the story is that every once in a while American government
involves itself in a little country, makes a mess and then leaves.
And Nicaragua is an example of that. No one will admit it about
Cuba, but Cuba is an example of that.
MC: Clearly there is this huge resistance to facing the history
of American involvement in Central and South America anyway. Because
we have the pictures of Marines in 1901 with babies on their bayonets.
No one wants to see those.
RB: I am not willing to accept that no one wants
to know. I have put two conversations with Howard
Zinn on this web site. Howard's People's History has
sold over a million copies and he is busier than ever. Here's a
historian with a different view of American history and my talks
with him continue to be some of the most accessed items on Identity
Theory.
MC: I shouldn't say nobody. I think there are people who want to
know. It doesn't seem to be a critical…
RB: Groundswell?
MC: That's very funny. I think there is niche comprehension and
curiosity, but for the most part people either don't want to know
or they do want to know but they realize that they can't necessarily
do anything useful now with the information. If they are going to
effectuate any changes, it's not going to be by clobbering the other
side.
RB: That is dealt with in one of your essays about people believing
that they had no agency in their lives…
MC: I think that that is true although since I wrote that essay,
I think the other guys won. That essay was about the two teams,
the mutant elites, all positive, during the Reagan years when everyone
was supposed to be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, if
they were depressed. And there were people like me, fuck-ups who
just sat on the side of the bed with their heads in their hands,
thinking, "Oh there's nothing I can do." But that attitude
became very much more peppy and uplifted and positive and even people
like me decided it was unhealthy to think of themselves as fuck-ups.
Instead we started talking about ways to empower ourselves. I'm
at the point where I refuse to say that's a bad thing. I would like
to join them as much as possible. As a journalist I found it too
difficult, there were too many obstacles to writing what I wanted.
Certainly on the subject of Nicaragua. I actually stopped doing
that kind of journalism when I went with Andrew Kopkind —who
was a wonderful journalist on the Left— to Africa and we were
going to travel across the whole continent. So we started in Senegal
and worked our way east and wen to South Africa and what I saw there,
debilitated me. I knew that I could not really write about what
I had seen in the way that I had experienced it. I sort of devolved
and cut the trip short and came back. Politically, what is the less
depressing way to put it? I think fiction, right now for someone
like me, is a better mode of persuasion than straightforward journalism.
But, anyway, just to finish up what I was saying before about the
Village Voice and Nicaragua, one of the pieces I brought
in was about someone I had met in Nicaragua, Orlando Tardencilla,
who had been notorious about ten years earlier. He was someone whom
the Americans were going to display at a press conference in which
he would accuse people on the left of having done all sorts of heinous
things. Then he had reneged. When I interviewed him, Tardencilla
told me that in the time he was jailed in El Salvador and tortured,
there were CIA people in the torture rooms, you know, helping out,
and giving instructions. I had an amazing interview with him and
I was hoping they would publish it even with disclaimers saying,
“We can’t guarantee, etc." But my editor at the
time just wouldn’t publish the piece. He said he didn’t
believe the guy and it wasn’t true. And also that the Americans
weren’t involved in the Salvadorian elections and so on. Of
course, a few years later all of this was on the front page of the
Times. It was clearly true and all those people over there
knew it was true and you were there and had experienced the reality
and you could make the judgement as a journalist, the kind of judgement
you make all the time anywhere. That's why political organization
is the way to go.
RB: There was Ray Bonner at the Times being thwarted about
the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. The State Department denied
that the El Salvadoran army had massacred this village. Of course
fifteen years later the New Yorker publishes confirmation
of it and devotes a whole issue to it.
MC: Yes. Yes.
RB: That was a moment in which I though Tina Brown was not a child
of the devil.
Clearly there is
this huge resistance to facing the history of American involvement
in Central and South America anyway. Because we have the pictures
of Marines in 1901 with babies on their bayonets. No one wants
to see those. |
MC: I don't think she was a child of the devil.
I think the devil moved in before Tina Brown came to New York.
RB: [laughs]
MC: On the other hand from a personal point of view, that was a
fascinating education in how these things work. I just did an interview
for O magazine with Lani Ganier, who is really interesting.
I had heard her talk at Bard College where she gave the commencement
address, and she talked about failure as what she calls "the
failure theory of success." It's not one of these perky superficial
things. It's some profound thinking that she has spent on the subject
of how failure can focus you, what it can teach you and how you
can move from there to connect with bigger issues to have a better
understanding of what is going on. I really think that's something
I could support.
RB: Oprah is the target of a lot of poking and snidery, but at
the heart of it there is something that is better for her works
than not.
MC: Yes.
RB: This despite the fact that there is a kind of cultishness and
self-help blather. [pause] What are the things that you think are
important today? What's important for you to think about?
MC: I'm less and less content oriented and more and more interested
in how people feel in their own skin and their problems synching
up with other human beings. The issues come and go and for me content
has acquired this impenetrability. I guess that is what I have really
been saying.
RB: The issues have become litmus tests: where are you on abortion?
Where are you on welfare? And so on. And if we don't agree on these
issues than we can't be friends or get along, whether or not one
has thought out their beliefs.
MC: That's not what I meant but that's interesting. I think that's
also true. Many of us are willing to have a bigger set of bedfellows
than we used to have. Let’s just say that American politics
have just become so difficult and painful—difficult to address
in book form by me directly because I had my formative years at
a time and place where politics was everything. I actually still
feel politics is everything and that if I talk about people's self-consciousness
and their relationship to one another I am always talking about
politics as well. Um, I don't know. What do you think?
RB: As you were saying that I was thinking about getting to a place
in one's life where you start checking off what you find irrelevant
and not personally worth paying attention to— where you are
not sure what is important but pretty clear on what isn't.
MC: Well, of course and that list grows bigger
and bigger. It becomes a frightening dimension. This is, by the
way, one advantage of having all these different parts. For example,
the non-fiction book I wrote in the middle of writing this novel,
a book about women, in particular it was about single women. I feel
as if I got rid of a lot of the obsessive interest I had in gender
matters. I find myself less interested in continuing to explore
gender analysis. What I need to work with is a more ambiguous yet
nuanced grid than that. I am also interested in what sensations
feel fresh, what is pleasurable? I teach a course in Proust every
Fall to freshman honors students at New York University. It's a
seminar. We read all of Proust in one semester. Which is incredible.
It's ridiculous and really exhilarating. But the biggest problem
I have is they are all so achievement oriented. They do the work.
They do the reading. They do their papers and the writing. But the
hardest thing is to get them to read for pleasure. And to connect
emotionally with what they read. Luckily, by midterm time, they
are won over. Although I suspect it's the Stockholm syndrome.
RB: [laughs]
MC: I'm not sure what it is, but I think it's the magic in the
Proust works that wins them over but I have to really work at it.
That's something that seems to be drifting away. That interests
me still, when I read Proust, which for me now is so infinitely
pleasurable. I used to be bored in parts, and now I find almost
every sentence blissful. You do go a little crazy, but what really
interests me in Proust and in writing, is what is it that feels
alive.
RB: I thought you were going somewhere else with that. You started
off by talking about fresh things and ideas. I wanted to get an
idea of how much contact you have with new ideas and trends. How
much of a generational barrier do you feel there is?
MC: I have a smattering of people in various age groups. My connection
with my students, many of who stay in contact with me—after
you have read Proust with someone you fall into a weird kinship—I
see many things from their point of view. Also, I have nine-year-old
son. To go back to a question you asked before. This is a thing
I would love to write about, and I was talking about it with my
agent and we agreed I should put it on a list and forget it. I would
like to write about the seeming impenetrability of this youth culture
and what it means to someone my age—I'm fifty-five now. What
is my responsibility to myself in terms of trying to understand
some of it? I like quite a lot of it. I like more of it than most
of my peers. Especially the music, I don't like teen movies very
much. That's the point. I feel like should be able to pick and choose.
RB: I was trying to figure out what the sound was in the echo chamber
when Seamus Heaney anointed Eminem. I guess any pronouncements by
Heaney are news but I didn't think it was such a big deal [Does
it rival Bob Dylan's pronouncement that Smokey Robinson was one
of America's great poets?]. Though I guess now the AARP can arrange
for group discounts on Eminem's CDs.
 MC:
I think people don't understand the context. And he [Eminem] makes
a cheap target for conservative analysts. Everybody just kind of
buys it. Which is too bad because that keeps things boring and static.
RB: I wonder how much effort it requires to refuse to accept the
dominance of youth culture and the impenetrability of it.
MC: My experience with my students is that they are eager to invite
older people in.
RB: Demographics are about marketing. On an intellectual or analytical
level there is no reason to surrender to the demographic myths,
but the marketplace will keep reminding us.
MC: I think, and rightfully so, that there are a lot of people
my age who are resentful that they don't get more of what they need
culturally because everything these days seems to be about marketing,
and I agree that that's too bad. It would be a better marketplace
and, I feel, a more lucrative one if this huge cohort that's so
often ignored were…I think it's going to be interesting to
see if some new paradigm will come up. But so far I still feel that
people now in their '40s and 50s and 60's still have an interesting
perspective.
RB: Sure. It remains to be seen if they have any power.
MC: They have more buying power than they are being given credit
for.
RB: A last question. A dog meets an unfortunate fate in the book…
MC Totally made up. I'll tell you something. That's the point at
which—so a dog dies early in the book. But what I added this
time. I was cruel to the dog. I was cruel to the characters, as
I think one has an obligation to be. Something very cruel happens
around the dog's death, and that's when I knew that this was going
to be an interesting novel, actually. I thought, "Well, these
people are not just chattering and there is something bigger at
stake that does have to do with cruelty and compassion and whether
it's really possible to make connections and live like a human being
in the world. Or not. Even if you think you are, just outside of
earshot there is some awful…”
RB: Things happening.
MC: Yes. Right.
RB: Thank you.
MC: Well, thank you. This was really fun, actually.
|
Posted:
September 9, 2003
