Andre Dubus III
Robert
Birnbaum speaks with the author of House of Sand and Fog
Posted: (Date Unknown), 2000
Copyright 2000 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
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Andre Dubus III has worked as a private investigator,
corrections counselor and bounty hunter — and various
other jobs. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous stage plays
and three independent films. He is also a general contractor and
carpenter. Andre also teaches writing at Tufts University and Emerson
College in the Boston area and is the author of one story collection,
The
Cage Keeper and other Stories, and two novels, Bluesman
and most recently, House
of Sand and Fog (which was a finalist for the 1999 National
Book Award). Dubus has garnered other distinctions, including a
Push Cart Prize and a 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction.
He has also been published in Best American Essays 1994,
The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times Book Review
and numerous literary reviews. Andre Dubus III is the son of the
acclaimed and recently deceased writer Andre Dubus. He lives in
Newburyport, MA, with his wife and three children.
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this interview.
Robert Birnbaum: Why would you want to become a writer?
Andre Dubus III: Um. [You mean] Because of the daddy thing?
Well, it was not a conscious choice. I did not want to be a writer.
Matter of fact I resisted it up until my twenties. In school...in
public school nobody knew who my father was. And I didn't know who
my father was. Like most kids, I didn't know what my father did.
And I didn't care. And in my late teens I read his first novel,
The Lieutenant. I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I remember
putting it down thinking, "That was really good. My dad does something
really interesting." I felt no desire to do it myself. The thing
that I was best at in school were reading and writing subjects.
Teachers would encourage me to do more.
The first school I went to was Bradford College, where my father
taught... There was the first time I got a real dose of adulation
about my dad. And attention towards me about it. The questions were
"Why don't you write, you write really well?" I said, "No, I'm not
doing what my father does." Of course, I didn't know I felt that
way until I said it out loud. I always felt sorry for those guys,
you'd see those trucks 'Ralph & Sons.' So to answer your question,
I never wanted to be one. That's the last thing I wanted to be.
No friggin' way.
I went to the University of Texas at Austin ultimately, and studied
sociology and political science and economics and all that. I was
a Marxist. I was heading to Wisconsin to get my Ph.D in Marxist
social science. And then I was going to go to law school, and I
was heading toward some sort of human service. I was bullied as
a kid. I went to fourteen different schools before I got out of
high school. I began to fight back in my teens. I had a lot of rage.
And when I got more educated about the history of the world, I could
see that it's nothing but the history of bullying other people.
It's more than that, but that's a lot of what it is. I got hip to
American imperialism and I wanted to fight it. That's what I thought
I was doing when I left college. It was a very rational decision
(I know this is a long-winded answer).
I went back home to the East to live for a year — I
just wanted to do something physical — because I
was too good in school. I had a 3.8 average and I thought I should
get out of the books a little bit. I wanted to work in a factory
instead. I hired on a construction job with my younger brother in
Salem. I lived in Lynn, I was doing boxing there, at the Lynn boys
club. I was reading social theory at night (Max Weber). I started
to date this girl from Bradford, who was taking one of my father's
fiction writing classes. And she had a crush on this writer, in
her class. I was jealous. She'd come back flushed. I said, "You
know what writers are like? They drink a lot. They jump each other's
wives. He's probably an asshole." I was just jealous and insecure.
And then I was at my father's house and happened to see this guy's
manuscript (in my father's office). I picked it up. And I read this
four-page story. And it was beautiful (he's a good friend of mine
now). I was inspired. This weird thing. First, she had a crush on
him, and then I had a crush on him. It was really beautiful. I felt
this wonderful sense of...
I hadn't been reading fiction in years, I wasn't an English major.
In my off time I was reading social theory. And I was inspired.
Artistically inspired. I was twenty-one and a combination of inspiration
and a lowly combination of wanting to impress my girlfriend or to
show her I could be sensitive, too. That weird mix. So I started
to write a story. Spent three months on it. Had never taken a writing
class. Never thought of writing. When I put it down and finished
the story — a little story about my grandmother and
grandfather in Louisiana where I lived for a while — it
was a bad story. It was a first story in every way. But I really
felt hooked. And for the first time I felt like myself. I was twenty
one years old, and for the first time I felt like me. It was a really
a rare major life event. I put down the pencil, went for a drive
in my beat-up Toyota, around the back roads of Boxford. And everything
looked crystal clear and pristine. And I was all confused because
it seemed like I should be writing more. I wasn't confused about
the daddy thing; that never bothered me. It was a surprise to me.
So I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Stayed four
days and quit. I really liked it there. It's like the beautiful
woman you meet and talk to for five minutes and never see her again.
You think, maybe I should've called. Talked a little longer. So
that's a longwinded answer. I was reading masterpiece short stories
in my hotel talking to demographers and other sociologists at parties
at night. I thought, "These are nice people. but I don't want to
be a sociologist. What am I doing going into debt studying this?
I just want to know more stuff. That's all." So I quit.
RB: How did you end up at Austin?
AD: The honest answer is that I was involved with
an Iranian girl. This is 20 years ago. I was obsessed with her,
and we were in a deep and tumultuous relationship, and I couldn't
break up with her, and so in my 19-year-old romanticism I applied
to five universities, all state colleges, west of the Mississippi.
And [Texas] was one of the five. I took a train trip and visited
all five campuses, and when I got off at the Austin train station
I saw a billboard of Mexican food, Lone Star beer and underneath
it was a cactus. And there was a pretty senorita on the billboard.
It would have beat a bottle of Lone Star. I didn't have to see anything
more. So I said, "That's where I'm going. This is where I'm going."
RB: In 1977, you must have been a pioneer in discovering
the charms of Austin, Texas. Were there many Easterners there?
AD: Yeah. It wasn't hip yet. It wasn't a hip place
to be. It was a great place. I love Austin...I haven't been back
since. It's a beautiful place, and I loved my time there. It was
rich culturally...Let me finish about the father thing. It only
became an issue for me when I began to publish. Then I got this
real father-shadow-son stuff. It was very distracting and a real
pain in the ass in my twenties. It's a lot less of a pain now because
I don't give a shit. I don't care.
RB: You don't strike me as someone who would use
'III' in their name.
AD: I don't. I don't even like it. I could have changed
my name. I could have dropped 'Andre' or dropped 'Dubus.' Initialized.
The reason I couldn't goes back to why I kept writing. I felt like
me for the first time. I think that's what Joseph Campbell was talking
about when he said that's what people are looking for, to feel the
rapture of life, they don't do that until they do that thing that
leaves them feeling more like themselves. So I couldn't put an inauthentic
name on it. Although I do feel like Andre III is a little inauthentic
because that three is just something — it's there,
that's my name but I've never used it. I don't like it. It sounds
aristocratic and I didn't grow up with any money. But that's it,
too bad, there are worse hands to get dealt. I just hope people
will get past it. I'm not past it when people keep hitting me over
the head with it. It's understandable, and I guess I'll have to
talk about this my whole life. So, I've sort of surrendered to that.
RB: Your "career path" has taken some interesting
turns, but you appear to have taken on the writer's life wholeheartedly.
You teach at Emerson and Tufts...
AD: You mean I'm completely in a literary world.
Yeah, I am. I didn't go to any graduate writing program. I hadn't
taken any writing classes. Right after I sold my first book in the
late '80s, I thought it was time I got some schooling. So I went
to Vermont's Low Residency Program for a year. It wasn't good year
for them, and it wasn't a good year for me, and I didn't get a lot
out of it. But what I did get was bombarded — because
in the writing world my father is known and he's respected, as he
should be, he's one of my favorite writers and I revere his work
completely. People would bombard me with this stuff. It was like
being Elvis, Jr. Frank Sinatra, Jr. Hank Williams, Jr. How did I
become a crown prince of this king? Who wants this? Let me out of
here. But what could I do? Stop writing? I may as well just kill
myself. Change my name? I may as well just kill myself. So screw
'em all I'm going to keep doing it. But I had to leave. It was too
much. I'm surprised that I'm in the whole scene now. But I'm glad
I'm there, it feels dangerous, to me, to hide from it and run away
from it. In politics the whole idea is to shine a light on the skeleton
in your closet. Let's just shine a light on it and talk about it...
RB: Do you think that you can teach people to write?
AD: No. Yes and no. I got into it because I was doing construction
and the same friend (ironically) whose story I had seen years earlier
and inspired me was teaching at Emerson. He did this all on his
own. I wasn't complaining about not having enough writing time.
He deduced that if I was working twelve hours a day doing construction,
I wasn't writing enough. He gave the head of the department at Emerson
my book and said, "You ought to hire this guy." So they
called me and offered me a job. So I went. I'd never been in a writing
class, and I hadn't taught one. So I didn't know where to go. Unfortunately
or maybe fortunately, my life has been lived largely in this spontaneous
ad-libbed way. Very improvisational. So here I am, a writing teacher,
and I don't know what I'm talking about.
I have seen that the writing classroom, the writing workshop can
be far more dangerous... destructive than helpful. The way to make
it good and the way I can keep doing it without feeling like a cynic...
a good writing teacher is simply a good guide. Our job is not to
make your stories the way we want them. Our job isn't to fix your
stories or write them the way we write them. Our job is to point
out what feels true and authentic in the work and what feels forced
and contrived. Let you, the writer, go back from the workshop — a
successful workshop has more questions than answers — and
you should leave with a deeper sense of what you're doing well and
a deeper sense of what you can work harder on. And then go back
to work. In that sense, I've seen great improvement. I work hard
on making it a very controlled environment. So people can't write
the stories for the writer. You can't trash a writer. You have to
be honest. Every semester I get writers who are much more gifted
than I am. And more gifted than others and you can see they have
this natural ability. I've seen over the years that doesn't make
a whit of difference. You need something else. One thing I think
a person needs — you've got to be a real worker bee.
Marge Piercy says, "Work is its own cure. You have to like it more
than being loved." If you've got that, forget the talent.
RB: What about the seemingly twentieth-century phenomenon
of 'writer's block'?
AD: What's also going on...it's just a theory. I think capitalism
has done a weird thing to it as well. [In] The Gift by
Lewis B. Hyde, basically the whole premise is that the artistic
thing is a gift. From whoever. To the person who writes, essentially
a gift to the culture. All these are gifts to us. And we do a weird
thing to the alchemy of gift when we price it. My own theory about
writer's block is that it's a real episode of self-consciousness.
You're more watching yourself writing than you are writing. You're
watching yourself writing, you've got the voice of the critics in
your head, you've got the publisher's deadline, you've got the advance
you have or haven't gotten in your head. All this is working against
you. We've become these little factories. In the same way we talk
about performance anxiety — about sexual relations.
What a weird way to talk about making love! What a completely perverted
way to talk about making love! But in this very visual surface culture
it make sense that you start to watch yourself as you are making
love to your wife. What the hell is that? It's the opposite of being
in the moment, in the Zen sense. So my own two cents on that is
that now that's also part of the mix... is that now these writers
are these little factories, these little businesses.
RB: And there is also 'wannabeism.' So many people want
to be a certain thing. Though they don't want to work for it. But
they want the perks and the lifestyle. And to be part of the camp.
It would seem that there is something attractive about being a writer.
Although if you ask many writers, they'll tell you it's misery.
AD: Another thing that writing programs can do if honest
and well done and constructive — and frankly if they're
loving. By loving I don't mean soft — I mean tell
the truth constructively. You can guide the writer who wants to
be a writer more than write to that understanding.
RB: Thirty years ago, how many writing programs were there?
AD: Very few. It's a huge industry now. It began at Harvard.
I forget the professors' names, but it was 1912 or so. They were
looking for a more innovative way to teach literature. So they said,
"Why don't we just have them write their own and see how hard it
is?" That was the first creative writing class, and it metamorphosed.
When my father went to the University of Iowa [Writer's] workshop
in the 60's it was one of six or eight. Now there are two hundred.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don't think it's a good development.
It smells like a racket to me.
RB: It seems to have paralleled the development of the MBA
programs. It seems like they are factories. Add to that the economics
of publishing are not hopeful for most writers...
AD: Admissions people ought to say, "It's not a degree that's
gonna get you a job. You're gonna be in debt, and you're gonna have
to still be waiting tables to pay this off. All it can give you,
if you're lucky enough to get the right teachers, is that you can
compress the apprenticeship period and learn more, faster. That's
it."
RB: And maybe you can get a teaching job.
AD: Maybe. But you probably won't. Another thing that these
things do give is a community. A lot of people don't grow up with
a writer in the family as I did. And it's nice to know one or two
or three people you like that you can share your work with and talk
to at three in the morning about how hard it's going. That's a valuable
thing to get.
RB: Don't writing programs work against that? Isn't there
a lot of competition and jealousy?
AD: Yeah, it's a real dark side of it. It really is. I tell
my students I am not remotely interested in their careers. Or their
academic lives. I'm not. I wish them all well.
RB: Students asking you where they should look for a job
or how to groom themselves for a position...
AD: I wouldn't know how to tell them. I don't have any connections.
I might know a few people who might know a few people who can talk
to some other people and maybe you could get an interview with somebody
for a job at the University of Maine or something.
I try to dissuade anybody from looking at this as a way to be a
writer. It's an insincere approach to this art form. I assume — and
I tell this to my students — that they are here because
they want to try and create art. Something beautiful in and of itself,
that lives on its own. That will affect someone that will never
love them. And let's try and work and find what those tools are.
Good luck. I hope wonderful things happen. But you may as well get
into the lesson now that the real prize is just doing it. Everything
else is gravy. Even then it's not such gravy. Now you get reviewed.
Anyone can say whatever they want. It's not all good. They have
this idea, I probably had it, too, that when you have this hard-covered
book all a sudden you've arrived. No, now you just have another
level of difficulty. Which is the nature of mature living. It's
the nature of adulthood. Reach this, and now bigger obstacles. Now
I can climb a bigger mountain. Well, good here's the biggest mountain
I've ever seen, right in front of me. You climb that. There's another
mountain. And this one's got lightning at the top and lava. And
there's a big hole...
RB: Everybody expects plateaus and sanctuaries in life.
AD: It is not like that. That expectation leads to marital
failures and poor parenting choices. I'm not above any of it. I
do it, too. But I do think we're better off not doing it. I'm not
a Zen Buddhist, but the more I hear about it the more I like it.
This whole notion of being present in the moment, accepting what
is, sounds very healthy and sounds like the way to go.
RB: You dated an Iranian woman around the time of the revolution.
Did you know much about Iran?
AD: Not until I met her. I hadn't heard of Iran. Like most
teenage Americans, I was ignorant of all geography. She said she
was from Persia. She explained it all to me. We were in a relationship
for three or four years. In so far as you can have a relationship
with a Persian girl who is loyal to her Shiite Muslim heritage.
Which she was. Very interesting to go from late sixties-early seventies
free love to dating a Muslim.
RB: She had been recently expatriated?
AD: Yeah. Her father was a retired Iranian colonel in the
Shah's air force. And that's where I learned about the Shah. I learned
about how corrupt the regime was. I learned more after I left that
relationship and studied more about the CIA involvement in all sorts
of cultures. And just how terrible the Shah was. How terrible the
CIA was. And the fact that my friend was actually a part of that
culture was interesting.
RB: And twenty years later this shows up in House of
Sand and Fog. Complicated experience, the life of the Iranian
exile...
AD: It's much more a thing of face and pride. Much more
about pride than comfort. For Americans it would be more about,
"Hey, where's the cash?" We like all that status stuff, but not
as much as the Iranians.
RB: You explored the complexity of this Iranian exile family's
life. No one else has done that in American literature...
AD: I didn't think of that before. I was relieved that an
Iranian reviewer in San Francisco actually gave it a thumbs-up.
She had some problems with my Farsi. Which is understandable. I
tried to get right but some of my colloquialisms were mixed up.
I'll have to fix that for the paperback.
RB: How long did it take you to write this book?
AD: Four years. And this is having three children, working
at, usually three campuses. And having a carpentry job. So on a
good day, I get two hours in. I try to get no less than ninety minutes
a day. I wrote most of this book longhand, in pencil, in my car.
Cause we live in a small half-house — with little
kids it gets pretty loud. I didn't have an office. I wrote most
of it in my car in a graveyard near my house. It was very quiet.
All year long. Crank up the heat in the winter. Bug spray in the
summer. It took me three years to write the story and another year
to type up twenty-two notebooks. And another six months of extensive
revision after it was acquired by Norton.
RB: Extensive, meaning?
AD: "Murdering my darlings." Like Faulkner. Cutting a lot
that I liked. I tend to overwrite and then shave. My whole way of
writing — nothing new or original — I
try not to outline or think ahead, I try to let the characters go
where they're going to go. And I see where they go. And sometimes
I write down a bunch of dead-end roads to find what it is.
RB: Were there always just three voices?
AD: Yeah. Actually I thought it was going to be two voices.
Then Lester came in and completely surprised me. Him coming into
the story was a complete surprise. I had no idea this guy was ever
going to show up. Usually I can't trace the genesis or origin of
the stories. But in this one I could see some of the things that
were knocking around in my subconscious for a few years. When I
worked as a private investigator in Colorado, I worked for the U.S.
Marshal who looked like the Lester I hopefully described in the
book. A kind of lean, dark, masculine, yet something strong about
him. He had a crooked mustache and he always looked sad. And he
carried a big-assed gun. I could never get that out of my head.
He showed up ten years later in this.
RB: Are you happy with this book?
AD: Yeah. I'm never completely happy. I'm always a little
haunted by everything that I write. There's always that feeling
of 'just give me one more year.' But this one, I know it's the most
accomplished I've done. There's no doubt in my mind. I've never
worked harder. I found a new stamina for working and revision. I've
always tried to revise and never take the short route in work. Whereas
before I felt I could run 8 or 10 miles, now I feel like pushed
the 18 or 20 mile range. So I feel it's a solid book and it's the
first time I'm looking forward to people reading it. Before I wouldn't
go out of my way to say I have a book... I'm really curious about
what people think.
RB: The fate of the protagonist's son, was that a given
from the inception of this story?
AD: Nope. I can tell you that that was the hardest part
of writing this. Sustaining the two voices. And trying to stay out
of it. I was open to them never meeting. I did not want to contrive
the action. So I just waited to see what happened. When things begin
to escalate with her [Kathy's] addiction. Which surprised me, too.
I believed when she said she didn't have an alcohol problem. And
she starts to go over the edge and then Lester gets involved and
things are escalating. I started to have a bad feeling. All along
the way, I was completely open to — certainly there's
going to be a moment for some sanity, and there will be some moments
for reconciliation, some moments for some talk. Some moments to
work this thing out.
Frankly, I have a blessed life — I'm blessed with
three healthy children, thank god. I have a really solid marriage.
I have a creative outlet, and I make enough money to feed us. What
the hell else more do I want? I don't want to write a tragedy. I
didn't want to. But I also didn't want to steer it. I think it's
important to allow it to be what it's going to be. So to answer
your question. No, I did not know it was coming and if I did I don't
know if I could have written it, because I must have had to kill
a part of myself to write that. Truman Capote says, "A writer should
write as cool and detached as a surgeon." I must have just have
just anesthetized myself to stay in the scene and write it clearly.
It only was after a year when I read the galleys that I allowed
myself to feel the grief. In looking at it there's a sense of guilt.
Like, "C'mon man couldn't you have done something nicer for these
people?" Our job as writers is to try and find the particular truth
of this particular experience. I think what happens happened. I
have to let it say what it says...Not to say that we are all just
conduits. We do have a lot of selectivity... little microchoices.
But in order for it to go somewhere deep we have turn it over more
to our intuition or gut.
RB: When you start out with the character Kathy, you don't
see her as a terminal loser with nothing going for her?
AD: No. I did see her as being on the down side of things.
In a bad lull. I got the idea for that part of the story from a
newspaper clipping about a woman who was kicked out of her house
for failure to pay back taxes that she didn't owe. She was an older
woman. I actually brought this clipping to my first writing class
at Emerson in 1990 to show these eighteen-year-olds that here's
a good place to get story ideas, these news briefs. Because you
don't know anything. Imagination has to fill in the details. Man
shoots fifteen dogs. Drinks fifteen Pepsis. What's that about? So
I showed this clip about a woman being evicted and said someone
should write about it. Well nobody did. I put it away, and I never
forgot it. So I picked it up, and it never quite came together.
Then I saw a clipping that the man who bought the house was named
Mohammed. So that was sperm and egg. Something started to multiply
and divide. I started to write about Kathy from the point of view
of an older woman, but she very quickly metamorphosed into a younger
woman who had these problems. Again, it was very subconscious, and
it went back to an idea I had years ago. No, I wasn't aware she
was such a loser until I got deeper into her point of view. I didn't
know how unreliable she was, what a loose cannon she was. I always
thought it was the colonel who was the loose cannon...
RB: He turns out to be the most sympathetic character.
AD: He was for me.
RB: Not only because of the plot. He showed civility and
humanity and decency.
AD: That was a challenge, too. Because I did and do judge
that whole scene [the Shah's reign] as corrupt and awful. And what
we did with our covert money to support oil profits for a few. It's
an old story with us. For a handful of white men we sacrificed thousands.
So one of the challenges was not to prejudge this guy as a bad guy
or I'd never get into his skin. Characters won't let us in if we
do that. Hemingway had a great thing to say about that. He said,
"The job is not to judge but to seek to understand." And it was
easier for me because I knew a man like the colonel.
RB: Did many Iranians separate themselves from the Savak
(the Shah's secret police) the way the Germans separated themselves
from the SS?
AD: Yeah. I love the analogy to the Third Reich. It got
to be this, well that's them, and this is me, and I'm not them.
Well. But you are. You're in the culture. You stand up, and your
family gets shot. So it's understandable, the lack of courage.
RB: The colonel as an outsider provides interesting commentary
on American social values and behavior.
AD: The funny thing is — what I love about
writing is — I didn't have a notebook and put it
in his mouth. I was him driving home, looking at the houses, looking
at the TV lights. Thinking about Americans. And, of course Persians
don't sit in front of the TV for dinner. They sit and they talk.
For three hours. I think it's a real sickness to have those TVs
on our dinner tables. It kills community, it kills families. It
does more damage than we say. Of course, my opinions probably come
through but they were him [the colonel] I was pleased to see it.
RB: Any interest in House of Sand and Fog as a
movie?
AD: Yeah, there's been some real preliminary interest. I
actually had a producer call a month before it came out. Yeah, there's
some interest.
RB: Is that pro forma nowadays?
AD: This went out as a manuscript to some studio. And I
thought, "Well that's weird." I have a friend who never
sold her book, but sold the picture manuscript to Costa Gravas for
big bucks. So she sort of won and lost. It seems pretty dangerous
and weird.
RB: Do you read?
AD: I don't read as much as I would like right now. That's
got to do with a busy life and three little kids. I'm not complaining — I'm
blessed and I'm rich for it. It is the big missing chunk in my creative
life. I probably read, if I'm lucky, a book a month. I liked to
read about two a week. I read thousands of manuscript pages, and
that feeds me. Somebody said, "The writer who doesn't read, flourishes
on the vine." I realized after I finished the book that reading
Richard Price's Clockers gave me the idea to do this novel
with two voices.
RB: Boston is a community thick with fiction writers. Do
you hang out and/or know a lot of writers around town?
AD: No. I'm kind of out of the scene, really. I not really
a Boston boy. A lot of the established writers I've met through
my father. They're friends of his and have become friends of mine.
And I meet people at Emerson where I teach. But, the writers I know
are usually in my classes. Lot of my friends are in performing arts.
My wife's a dancer and choreographer, so a lot of them are actors
and dancers, newspaper reporters, carpenters. I do a lot of carpentry
work. So a lot of my friends are plumbers and electricians. It's
an amazingly rich community. In Newburyport, they had a fundraiser
for the library. They invited all the published writers...thirty
showed up. I had no idea. Just in that twenty-mile radius.
RB: How much do you think about the business?
AD: This can sound disingenuous with a book coming out and
national tour, which is a new thing for me, and I'm enjoying it.
I do think it's important to not think about that when you're writing.
It's wonderful to publish, and it's very gratifying to hold that
book. But I do think you really just have to concentrate on the
work. And it can be very distracting, harmful to creativity to get
wrapped up in thinking about sales and marketing. I know writers
who abandon promising and exciting projects because they made the
prejudgment that they would never sell. I think that's like having
a child and thinking, "I'll never get so-and-so in to this school;
we're just going to move." How do you know that's going to happen
in twenty years? You have to be in the moment. Write your damn book,
and if you sell it, great. But it is a tough time.
RB: What do you intend to do for your tour audiences?
AD: Read from the book. Answer questions. I find it so hard
to read from novels. I'd really rather read a short essay or a short
story. I want to give 'em a whole experience. If the novel is a
face, then I just give them a little piece of the nose. Hope that
you can like the face...
RB: Given the explosion of author touring in the past few
years, why hasn't anyone tried to do something more than the predictable
short reading followed by the Q & A?
AD: You mean like take off our clothes and dance? I've also
acted consistently, on stage and small films throughout the last
twenty years. I started doing both at the same time. It was very
confusing in my twenties, I didn't know if I was supposed to be
an actor or a writer. It's an American thing to think you have to
make a decision. "What are you?" I do think there's this pressure...
When it comes to this reading thing, I try not to perform for a
reason. It seems to me that this is a weird thing to do. Have these
readings. Really, the experience is the book. We're not performers.
Some writers are also gifted speakers...and if they can do it wonderfully,
good. It's a weird thing to do. When I go to a reading I'm not really
there to hear someone read something which is better when I read
to myself anyway — usually most written work is better
to read to yourself quietly than to hear read aloud. I'm really
there to ask some questions. I try to keep my readings to 15 minutes
and then talk for thirty. Talk about writing, talk about the life.
I'd like to get more time to talk... I try not to perform, I try
not to be the monkey and the organ player... what gives me concern
is that I want people to forget I wrote the book. It's one of my
fears about being Andre the Third, is that people get so interested
in that story, or so wrapped up in what's it like to have the same
name and to be the son of the master writer, that they won't read
the book. So I want to disappear. I almost want to have anonymous
on that book. Pynchon and these guys who don't ever do interviews,
who disappear. I think they're on to something. You can be a little
too illusive. I simply want people to forget who wrote the book
and to practically forget they're reading a book. Because I worked
hard for them to get lost in the book. I do worry that my showing
up will be a distraction.
RB: What do you see for the future in your life of writing?
Is it possible that you might do something else?
AD: It's possible. That's a healthy way to look at it. I
think we get caught up at looking at ourselves as writers. We lock
ourselves into that noun and then stop growing in other ways. I
can't imagine not writing because I just don't feel like myself
when I don't. I also do some acting. When I'm not acting I feel
fine. I can go years. I can't go three or four days without writing
and not feel a little askew. There's some weird thing that happens
when you get some commercial success or worldly recognition. A friend
said, "What you've been working for all these years has finally
happened." A very American response. My first thought was, "Have
I been working for this?" And I thought, "Well, no." This is nice,
I won't say no to it. But I have been working on trying to write
better. That's it. I've been working on trying to write better stuff.
If this is one of the by products of that. Great. But I've really
been working on improving my use of abstract language. On not being
so literal. On allowing different kinds of characters to come in.
Been working on the thing. So when you say what do you see for the
future, I hope that writing is part of it. I try not to think about
writing more books. Right now there's this pressure… I'm working
on weird length fifty page stories that are coming out of me. They
take a year each. They're kind of hard to publish.
RB: You have no commitment to a particular form: novel,
short story, essay, novella?
AD: I really don't. I've published two novels, but I've
probably written five. They're what I like to read most, even though
I come from a short-story-writing family. I get more turned on by
a big, fat book. I really like getting lost in a big, fat novel.
Someone once said to me that you try and write what you like. I
don't know if my natural palette or canvas is the novel, but I hope
that when I start something it will be a novel. Not because they're
easier to sell, but because I like novels... I try to stay focused
on career. My wife is a creative artist. We want to do a play together.
We want to write it and act in it. I know that if I don't do these
things — and it feels like writing is a daily part
of it — I won't be myself. I hope that all that's
in the future, because to imagine without it is to imagine me no
longer living. It's that serious for me. It's that essential a part
of who I feel I am. When the world starts knocking; tours, interviews,
book publication its always a little disorienting and confusing.
Frankly, Rocky II is about that. Bud Schulberg wrote about
it. I forget the title. But the whole premise is that in America
success is failure and failure is success. How when you get that
golden wand it will really do a number on your creativity, your
muse, your spirit. And it can be very disorienting unless you are
fully grounded in some other ways it can really throw you. I try
not to think of the outside world too much. Which goes back to your
first question, why even try being a writer. I do it for the doing.
It's like a yoga practice. And every few years if I'm lucky there'll
be a book. And it does feel like a piece of good fortune because
it does feel like a completion of the act. If you're gonna be in
your garage working on your songs, why not open the doors one day
and play it for someone?
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