Gonzalo Barr

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

My friend and blogging colleague at dernière marge posted an excerpt from an interview given in 2003 by the late Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, to the Mexican edition of Playboy. The post is called, “bolañitas,” which reminds me of a puff pastry and is a clever word play on the bite-sized excerpt.

In the interview, Bolaño was asked about heaven and hell –

Playboy: Comment est le paradis ?
Bolaño: Comme Venise, je l’espère, un endroit plein d’italiennes et d’italiens. Un lieu qui s’use, s’érode, et qui sait que rien ne dure, pas même le paradis, et qu’au fond, ce n’est pas si important.
Playboy: Comment est l’enfer ?
Bolaño: Comme Ciudad Juarez, qui est notre malédiction et notre miroir, le miroir inquiet de nos frustrations, de notre interprétation infâme de la liberté, et de nos désirs.

* * *

Playboy: How is paradise?
Bolaño: Like Venice, I hope. A place full of Italian women and men. A place that is used and is eroded and that knows nothing will last, not even paradise, and in the end that isn’t so important.
Playboy: How is hell?
Bolaño: Like Ciudad Juarez[, Mexico], which is our curse and our mirror, the restless reflection of our frustrations, of our dirty interpretation of freedom, and of our desires.

As I could not find the original Spanish, I translated from the French translation of the Spanish by dernière marge.  But I did find this other quote from the same interview, which I translated directly from Spanish –

Playboy: ¿Por qué le gusta llevar siempre la contraria?
Bolaño: Yo nunca llevo la contraria

* * *

Playboy: Why are you always the contrarian?
Bolaño: I am never a contrarian.

Heaven and hell are well-trodden ground. Among the most famous literary interpretations are those of Dante and Milton. Machado de Assis described an impoverished and disorganized hell, with Satan living off nothing more than divine leftovers and the scraps of human carelessness.

Among the pictorial ones, Bosch comes to mind, but so does de Chirico, even if his paintings were not about heaven and hell per se. They were, however, about infinity and timelessness and they were hued with the color of melancholy.

Then there are the personal views, like the one Bolaño related. For me, there’s heaven as a sunlit island or like any place in northern Italy. Hell is another matter. If you have ever tried to make a life surrounded by unrelenting ugliness and banality, then you know what hell looks like. It looks like this –

Photo:  suburbs, realestatemiami blog; Sources: dernière marge blog, “bolañitas,” posted Sept. 30, 2008, second quote from the 2003 interview by Monica Maristain, editor of the Mexican edition of Playboy, wikiquotes, Machado de Assis, “A igreja do diabo,” Histórias sem data (1884)

The poetry of Rita María Martínez has appeared in literary magazines, such as Gulfstream, Ploughshares, MiPOesias, Diagram, Mangrove, Gargoyle, Tigertail: A South Florida Poetry Anthology, Stephen Minot’s Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, and Drama (8th ed.), and Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish.

Earlier this year, she published her first chapbook, Jane-in-the-Box (2008), by the March Street Press. Her publisher describes the poems –

In Jane-in-Box, the literary Jane Eyre is updated and unleashed into the twenty-first century. Lured by designer clothing and cosmetics, Jane’s consumerism is driven by the need to heal emotional wounds in poems like “Fashion Remedy” and “Jane Eyre: Heiress, Avon Lady, Plastic Surgery Junkie.” Each poem is a smartly annotated, hauntingly revisionist homage to Jane Eyre. A fan of high and lowbrow art, Martínez molds a series of sexually charged images from the vast storehouse of popular culture. Poems such as “Cross-Dressing” and “At the British Museum” attempt to reconcile conflicting depictions of female sexuality.
Smitten with Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic tour de force, Jane Eyre, since she was a teenager, Martínez resurrects familiar characters in “Mortification Tryptich,” “Rochester Triptych,” and “Vintage Bertha,” while brewing her own blend of Gothic romance.

She was born and reared in Miami, and earned an MFA in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University.

Like so many things Miami, her poems straddle comfortably both the English and the Spanish, the Cuban and the American. They resonate with familiar classical themes going back to our common European heritage, while making the local, the autocthonous resonate with the universal.

Going Bananas
My father rises each morning
to the fourteen varieties of banana trees
he’s cultivated with unrivaled
care, each tree casting shade across our lawn,
each racimo an offering my father hacks
with his machete, a small cruelty
he performs like a doctor circumcising
a newborn, though I like to think
he is unburdening these trees,
casting weight off the tired trunks
of his Aromatic; his Honduran Goldfinger
and its hybrids (Fhia-3 and Fhia-18);
his twenty-two-foot tall Saba,
tallest banana tree in the world;
his Apple Sugar, a.k.a. Mansano;
his plátano Enano: Dwarf Cavendish,
sweet midgets sacrificed
to the blender for smoothies;
his Jamaican Red, his Cuban Red;
his Misi Luki; his Mysore; his 3640;
his Gran Nain; and my favorite, Orinoco—
plátano Burro he hauls into the house
with the pride of a hunter.
When he enters the kitchen wearing
his sweat-stained Going Bananas T-shirt
my mother stares at the shoot
dangling from his hands
like a third arm and smiles,
though I know she’s thinking
of resin that’ll cling to the cutting board
and her fingers, but he submits los plátanos
like a boy bringing a drawing
to be exhibited on the refrigerator door,
so she strips, slices, mashes, fries
until they’re crunchy, sweet and salted,
tostones, mini-sunflowers humbly
acquiescing beside the breaded steak
on my father’s ivory dinner plate.

Barr: Rita, thanks for doing this interview. Before we start with the usual questions, Going Bananas has a ceremonial, almost ritualistic air about it.  How did you think of writing this poem?  You must have seen your father working in the yard countless times. What was it that made you sit down and write about it?

Martínez: Going Bananas is dedicated to my father. He has a green thumb and is obsessed with bananas. He is also a lover of knowledge and is a voracious reader. I had fun writing that poem. It was initially published in Ploughshares, then in the anthology Burnt Sugar, edited by Oscar Hijuelos and Lori Marie Carlson, and eventually was included in the latest edition of Stephen Minot’s Three Genres, the same textbook I used during my first creative writing course. Going Bananas is lighthearted and playful and I love playful poems; I like to have fun when I write. A lot of people seem to respond to that poem. This surprises me, because I don’t think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Food, however, unites people. They break bread together and they share with one another. Some good tostones can brighten up anyone’s day. I recently heard that eating bananas makes you smarter. Don’t know if that’s true. I’d ask but my dad but I am pretty sure he is biased.

Barr: The climax of the poem (and that’s what I love about your poems, they are like little stories), is when your father brings the plantains into the house and your mother looks at him. She knows the cut branch is going to bleed sap and stain something.

Martínez: My father walked into the house wearing a straw hat, holding a machete in one hand, and the large banana shoot in the other; he looked like a Cuban Crocodile Dundee. I could tell he was looking for praise from my mom; he was acting as if he had just returned victorious after grappling with a wild tiger. The whole scene just seemed amusing to me, but I suppose I was also a little awed at my father’s ability to create, to coax nature to create.

Barr: How do you write?

Martínez: Many of my poems were sparked while reading the poetry and fiction of others. I stop reading, grab a legal pad, and start writing. I’ve written many of the Jane poems at my parents house, so perhaps being there helped me channel this poem. I write in cursive on a notebook and use a gel pen. Afterwards, I type the text into the computer and revise as I go along. I also stuffed my ears with earplugs, so I wouldn’t be distracted by any noise! I have this unbelievable super-hearing, which is more of a curse than a blessing.

Barr: I often wish we had developed earlids, as well as eyelids.

Martínez: Earlier this week I was rereading Wuthering Heights. I know it’s a classic, and I know many readers are absolutely obsessed with this book. However, I have always extremely disliked the main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. They are very flawed individuals. But I decided to give the novel a second shot, and put my hatred of Heathcliff on hold. While rereading Wuthering Heights, I had an idea for a new Jane Eyre-related poem, titled “Letter to Edward.” In the chapbook, I have a poem titled “Letter to Bertha.” Now I am toying with the idea of writing additional Jane Eyre-related poems and turning them into another poetry collection. Wuthering Heights vividly describes the moors and touches on insanity and cruelty, so rereading it sparked an idea for a new poem, where I compare Healthcliff to Rochester.

Some of the Jane poems were written after reading A Room of Her Own, The Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar, Wide Sargasso Sea, or Angela Carter’s short stories and others. I wrote a good chunk of poems while commuting on the metro, though I usually like to write in bed during the late hours of the night when it is quiet. I am not a morning person, so I envy writers who roll out of bed and start writing.

Barr: Believe me, there’s nothing to envy about waking at 2:30 in the morning, which is my latest approach to attacking my novel.

Martínez: I am of a different breed.

Reading Jane Eyre II
I covered it with clear contact paper,
wrote my name in caps across the foredge in black
marker.
The bloated book rested on my desk like a rainbow
trout.
Mrs. Lund poised on the stool, her bangs and bob stiff
like a man in a toupee, face primed with a thick coat
of concealer. She hinted the secret at the heart of the
text –
I spotted it in her eyes whenever she laughed, flung her arms like tentacles, crossed her legs,
private insanity hidden insider her wisteria wool
skirt, tucked out of sight like Thornfield’s third-floor
tennant, Linda Blair’s precursor, the basket case
languishing in bed.
I read in bed, on the bamboo love seat, beneath the
shade
of my father’s banana trees. I scarfed the pages like
pork rinds,
yuca chips, crackers slathered with guava jelly.
I binged constantly, sunk my canines into text
while Blur’s Boys and Girls wailed in the background like
Bertha on speed.
I carried it for weeks inside the outer pocket of my
Eastpack
like Tic Tacs, a passport, a compact I’d flip open
during lunch, between class, before soccer
practice — the Bantam
paperbacks lodged between Agnes Grey and Wuthering
Heights
at Adolph’s bookstore, its spine red-orange like papaya
pulp.
I plucked it from the shelf and stared at the cover –
the forlorn wedding dress yearning for Jane’s scapula,
her small breasts, the warmth of her hips when she
walks
across the bedroom and steps into wedding slippers,
then into absence, the foot’s descent consuming as
quicksand,
the subtle curve of her arch sheathed by glass.

Barr: Why Jane Eyre?

Martínez: I read it as a junior in high school and was captivated by the plot. It’s a page
turner. Thackeray could barely put the book down when he first read it and gave it a glowing review. I am fascinated by the story. The plot has all the right ingredients: mystery, romance, adventure. The reader really gets to know Jane and is able to live inside her head. One traces her life from a young age. By the end of the novel, the reader knows every intimate detail of Jane’s life—much in the same way the reader gets to know Pip from Great Expectations or Bailey from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Jane Eyre is the story of an underdog, and audiences usually root for underdogs. Characters like Edward
Rochester, Bertha Rochester, St. John Rivers, and Blanche Ingram are also extremely memorable. I’ve found myself relating to different characters during different stages of my life. And Charlotte’s prose is very poetic and beautiful. There’s a reason it’s a classic.

Barr: Would you call your poetry feminist?

Martínez: Yes, I consider my writings to be feminist, though there are times I dislike the
label. No offense to Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare, but at age sixteen it was refreshing to read a novel penned by a female—a novel which is part of the literary canon. Poems such as “Cross Dressing” and “Reading Jane Eyre II” are a tribute to Charlotte Brontë and other female authors who wrote pseudonymously. Female authors were judged on a different scale. Brontë wanted the reader to approach the novel in an unbiased manner—to reserve judgment according to the literary merits of the work as opposed to the gender of its author. “Letter to Bertha” and several other poems are attempt to address the important issue of female authorship and female insanity and its treatment.

Barr: Thank you, Rita.

Rita María Martínez will read this Sunday, September 28, 2008, at 6:00 p.m., along with other graduates of the Florida International University M.F.A. program, at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables (305.442.4408)

Photos: picture of Rita María Martínez, courtesy of the poet, picture of banana leaves, Gonzalo Barr; Sources: Rita María Martínez, “Going Bananas,” Ploughshares (Spring 2004) and “Reading Jane Eyre II,” Jane-in-the-Box (2008)

You never know where you are going to find something interesting. This interview of Salman Rushdie is from the latest issue of Departures –

Departures: You seem to have a great interest in the notion of defeat. And maybe failure, in some way?

Rushdie: One of the first times I ever met Günter Grass — I think it was in Germany when Midnight’s Children came out in translation — and he talked very interestingly about defeat. He said he felt that Germans had learned more from their defeat than Americans had learned from their victory.

Departures: How do you see that?

Rushdie: …When you lose, you have to question everything. So losing is a much more profound act. In my own life I’ve found that losses teach you more than gains. One of the great losses for me was when my parents sold our house in Bombay, which I felt was the place where I was rooted. I was 16 or something, and I’ve never been so angry at my parents. But now if I look at the kind of life I’ve had, it grows out of that loss. Had I had that permanent home, I would just have gone back there to live after Cambridge and stayed forever. God knows if I’d ever have written anything worth a damn.

Source: Departures (May/June 2008)

El nuevo Herald recently interviewed Cuban writer, Zoé Valdés, author of La nada cotidiana (1995, translated to English as Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada), Te di la vida entera (1996, translated to English as I Gave You All I Had), and other novels and works.

Valdés was born in Havana in 1959. She worked with the Cuban delegation to UNESCO and the Cultural Office of the Cuban Embassy in Paris from 1984 to 1988. From 1990 to 1995, she was subdirector of Cine Cubano magazine and a screenwriter for the state-run film industry, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). She wrote La nada cotidiana in 1993-1994, while still living in Havana, and asked a journalist to smuggle the manuscript out of Cuba. Since then, she has been in exile in Paris with her husband and child. Te di la vida entera was a finalist for the Premio Planeta in 1996. Her most recent novel is La cazadora de astros (2007).

Following is an excerpt from the interview in Spanish [translation to English mine] –

¿Cuando recuerdas haber comenzado a leer, y qué leías?…

“…leí muy temprano todo lo que me traía mi abuela, una pieza de teatro para ensayarla con ella, El Mastín de los Baskerville, Las mil y una noche, todo Jules Verne, todo Oscar Wilde, El extranjero de Camus, Shakespeare, la poesía de Victor Hugo, el Decamerón, que a ella le encantaba, Baudelaire en francés, sin entender ni papa; mi madre leyó el Quijote y me lo hizo leer con 12 años, se lo agradeceré siempre…Mi formación es vasta pero caótica.

No tenía estantes para libros ni dinero para comprarlos, guardaba los libros en un tanque de agua, sin agua, claro, me fascinaba meterme dentro, zambullirme en los libros. Vivíamos en un cuarto de la calle Muralla, el edificio se derrumbó, estuvimos dos años en el albergue de Monserrate, al lado del edificio Bacardí. Durante esos dos años viví y me bañé en el cine Actualidades, frente al albergue, porque las condiciones de éste eran terribles, y mi abuela habló con la taquillera del cine para que al menos dejara a los niños bañarse en el aseo de los baños, y nos quedábamos a ver tandas y tandas de películas, soviéticas, coreanas, francesas de vez en cuando…Fué una época inolvidable eso de vivir la mitad del día en una luneta de cine…”

* * *

When do you remember first reading and what did you read?…

“…at a very early age I read everything that my grandmother brought to me – a play that we would rehearse together, The Hound of the Baskervilles, One Thousand and One Nights, all of Jules Verne, all of Oscar Wilde, The Stranger by Camus, Shakespeare, poetry by Victor Hugo, The Decameron, which she loved, Baudelaire in French, even though I didn’t understand squat. My mother read Don Quixote and made me read it at twelve years old. I will always be grateful to her for that. My education was broad, though chaotic.

I didn’t have shelves for books or money to buy them. I stored the books in a water tank that was without water, of course. I loved to crawl inside the tank and bathe myself in the books.

We lived in a room on Muralla street. The building collapsed and we spent two years in the Monserrate refuge, next to the Bacardí building. During those two years I lived and bathed in the theater Actualidades, in front of the refuge. The conditions in the refuge were terrible. My grandmother spoke with the ticket vendor so she would allow at least the children of the refuge to bathe in the bathroom sinks. And we stayed to watch showing after showing of movies, Soviet, Korean, sometimes French movies. It was an unforgetable time for me to live half the day in the orchestra section of the theater…”

Photo: Zoé Valdés, from her website; Sources: El nuevo Herald, Zoé Valdés website

LITERARY LEAP: GONZALO BARR LEAVES THE LAW FOR A CAREER AS A WRITER

Posted on Mon, Jan. 28, 2008

BY ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ

PETER ANDREW BOSCH / MIAMI HERALD STAFF
Gonzalo Barr.

On the first day of his new life, Gonzalo Barr awoke at 2:30 a.m. and finished reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The 827-page novel, which spans decades and offers acute observations about race, pop culture and consumerism, dazzles many readers but defeats others. Barr found it an invigorating read, and when he closed the book that December morning, the lawyer and former medical-school student knew a few things:

He had done the right thing by resigning from his lucrative Miami law practice. He would finish the novel he had begun writing between clients and cases. He would devote the rest of his life to writing.

”It’s scary to quit your job, but at the risk of sounding pompous I think I did it at the perfect time,” Barr says. “I have absolutely no second thoughts.”

When Barr quit the law in December, he was only months away from clocking the Big Five-Oh, and ”how many more productive years do I have, really?” he had asked himself.

His decision was eased by changes in his practice that would have meant more travel and less writing time. ”I wanted to pull the plug in 2008. So it was just a matter of doing it earlier,” he says.

Barr does not have an agent or a publisher for his novel, and Leejay Kline, his mentor and creative-writing teacher, calls the move ”pretty ballsy.” But what Barr does have is an impressive debut to his credit. His first book, the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa (Houghton Mifflin, $12 in paper), won the coveted Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize in 2005, garnering attention and admiration from several established writers.

It is a quintessential Miami book, ripe with quirky characters, keen observations of only-in-South Florida situations and a deep compassion for the strange and the flawed. The opening story, for instance, is about two balseros and what happens when one lends the other his wife’s car. Another story, the three-page The Sleepless Nights of Humberto Castaño, is about an overprotective father.

`ENGAGING, FUNNY’

Francine Prose, the Bakeless Prize judge, wrote that the stories were ” . . . engaging, funny, highly enjoyable. . . .” The Times Literary Supplement opined: ”a brilliant short story collection.” The Los Angeles Times: “ . . . [T]he stories sparkle with daily ritual, along with the bonus (beyond pleasure) of a spirit-cleansing kindness.”

By phone, Prose, a prolific novelist and essayist, says she was touched by the way Barr showed sympathy for his characters. “I liked the liveliness and the spirit. I really admired the energy.”

Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies and other novels, remembers reading some of Barr’s stories in workshops at Bread Loaf in Vermont. ”He was probably my oldest student there, so his stories had a sense of gravity and experience the others didn’t have,” Alvarez says. “Gonzalo was very committed and very serious about his work.”

For Barr, this unexpected, warm literary welcome, which included a multicity book tour, confirmed his secret dream.

”I remember realizing that the one thing I really wanted to do more than anything else in the world was to write,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t really sure how to go about it or how I could even support myself.”

Barr’s new novel expands on one of the stories from The Last Flight. The Natural History of Love recounts, in part, the lovesickness of a young character with whom Barr shares few traits except that both attended private schools in Miami.

Those who know Barr and his work have no doubt that he will succeed, despite the risk and the odds against launching a writing career at his age.

TAKING MIAMI’S PULSE

John Dufresne, author of several novels including the upcoming Requiem, Mass., met Barr at a Friday-night writing group the Florida International University professor hosts. Some of the stories from The Last Flight were first discussed there, and Barr ”always worked very diligently and improved them greatly,” Dufresne says. “He’s really got a finger on the pulse of Miami.”

Kline, who taught Barr in a continuing-education class at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College, agrees. ”Gonzalo has an incredible work ethic,” Kline says. ‘A lot of people say `I have an idea for a book,’ but they don’t really pursue it because they’re not willing to put in the time and effort. Gonzalo is.”

What’s more, adds Kline, Barr’s goal is not to become a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. ”What’s on his mind is writing literary fiction. Good fiction,” Kline says. “That’s all he wants.”

Born in Miami to a Peruvian father and Dominican mother, Barr grew up mostly in Little Havana, watching the influx of Cubans change his home town. Most colleagues and acquaintances assume he’s from the island, too.

”I cannot deny that the Cuban culture, the way Cubans speak even, has had an indelible impact on me,” he says. And upon his fiction.

STARTED AT AGE 5

Barr wrote his first story, about a king who was getting married and looking for a bed, when he was 5. His love for writing deepened during his years at Immaculata-LaSalle High School and Belen Prep. English teachers encouraged him, including a nun who gave him Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. He eventually published two stories in the campus literary magazine.

Yet, he knew his family did not regard writing as a worthy profession. After college at Columbia in New York, he headed off to medical school, intending to become a psychiatrist. But during a rotation through psychiatry, ”I had this conversion,” he says. “I no longer believed in Freud.”

Barr transferred to the University of Florida’s law school. After graduation, he worked as a solo practitioner, then joined a small firm and, later, another, where he specialized in personal-injury law. He made a good living.

”Yet, all the while I felt I was not being true to myself,” Barr recalls. ‘I kept asking myself, `What am I supposed to be really doing?’ I was looking for meaning in my life.”

In 2000, he enrolled in Kline’s class. He had been writing sporadically — ”lots of words going nowhere” — but he promised himself that in five years he would publish a book. He wrote a couple of hours before work almost every day and attended several writers’ conferences, including Bread Loaf, where he read about the Bakeless Prize. To finish his manuscript for submission, he ended up pulling all-nighters.

When he learned he had won, that his manuscript would be published as a Houghton Mifflin Mariner paperback original, “I closed my office door and did a little dance. I couldn’t believe it.”

The prize, he adds, gave him a sense of validation.

Still, ”I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. “I’m still trying to figure things out. But I realize the decision was really a no-brainer. On my death bed, I didn’t want to regret not having written what I wanted to write.”

Source: The Miami Herald

This morning, I finished reading Conversations with Philip Roth (edited by George J. Searles).  The book is part of the excellent University of Mississippi series of interviews with authors.  Unfortunately, many of the interviews, which span from 1960 to 1991, are so repetitive that you start skimming by page 200.

If interviewers asked the same questions of Roth, it is no wonder that he gave similar answers — Is Zuckerman you?  How much of your work is based on fact?  Questions like those appeared and reappeared in almost every interview.  Which was a shame because, by doing so, the interviewers wasted the opportunity to engage one of our best minds.

Roth is extraordinarily articulate when he talks about literature.  His observations on the craft will send you thinking in all directions.

I noted 22 passages in the book that I thought were worth marking and returning to read again later.  But the one that I would like to share with you here is the last one.  It appears on the last page, in the last paragraph of the book.  In the passage, he describes what it was like to write when he was still an unpublished writer at the University of Chicago teaching English Composition.

Was my life then simple? I guess it was. I wanted to be a writer, write the things. That’s the whole story then.
I prefer the writer I was in Chicago at twenty-three, even if I can’t read his writing. But who doesn’t? Who wouldn’t? Unguarded! I was actually unguarded. Hard for me to believe. I didn’t know who might be inspired by my writing to want to smash me one right in the face, and so I walked around with my kisser in the air as though I’d never heard of custard pies.
You know what it was? It was stupid! It was wonderful.

Innocence always is.

Image:  Typescript with holographic revisions to the ending of Patrimony by Philip Roth, Library of Congress

John Cheever, in the preface to his inimitable collection of stories, wrote –

The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself. Naive, provincial in my case, sometimes drunk, sometimes obtuse, almost always clumsy, even a selected display of one’s early work will be a naked history of one’s struggle to receive an education in economics and love.

I have often stated that one does not decide to become a writer, the way one decides to be a pilot or lawyer or doctor. In those cases, you like something, it seems like a good way to make a living, so you do it, after completing the requisite training. Writing, on the other hand, chooses you. And you know it has chosen you when nothing else matters, when each day that you do not write feels like a lost day, a waste of time. You know that you are a writer when you have to write and, in fact, you do write, if only to quell that gaping emptiness.

As mysterious as all this sounds, writing, like any other craft, requires an education and training of its own. It requires a lot of reading and writing. It also requires learning the principles of the craft, even if your plan is to subvert all the rules.

For years, I wrote and read books and read books about writing fiction. The books about writing fiction repreated a few “rules” that their authors insisted weren’t really rules, but that they recited nonetheless. We know what these “rules” are — “Write what you know.”  ”Show don’t tell.”  And so on.

I knew the rules, the way that a law student knows the rules of evidence or a medical student the anatomy of the mediastinum. You know it in a theoretical sense. It isn’t until the law student sees the rules of evidence work in court or the medical student peers into an open chest (and discovers that the arteries and veins do not really come marked conveniently in red and blue!) that everything clicks together.

For me that eureka moment happened when I attended my first writing class. It was taught by Leejay Kline, who was then a graduate student at Florida International University, working toward a masters of fine arts, which is the terminal degree for creative writing students.

In a class that lasted six, maybe eight weeks, I wrote two-thirds of the stories that appear in my collection of short stories, The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa (Houghton Mifflin 2006). I wonder what might have happened had I never taken that class. I suspect that I know the answer. Being Lee’s student was pivotal in my career as a writer and in my life. That is the principal reason that I dedicated the book to him.

Following is an interview that Lee kindly agreed to give me. Consider it a student’s homage to his mentor.

Barr: What do you think about teaching creative writing as a means of supporting yourself while you write? Some people think it is the natural complement to writing. Others think that teaching anything is so demanding that it stands in the way of writing.

Kline: I suspect the desire for security and a steady paycheck motivates writers to teach much more than their desire to impart their small wisdom to graduate students. Many fine writers teach. Or perhaps I should say many fine teachers are writers. I suspect the great writers of our time who teach wrote first and the teaching was offered to them. Writing and teaching are separate things; one is done in a room full of people and one is done in solitary confinement. Both, if done well, take a lot of time and one, because of the time devoted to the other, will always be jealous of the other. The argument that teaching in a creative writing program places one in a community of writers is strained, I think. Maybe I will get to come back to that “community of writers” notion in another question.

Barr: How important do you think it is to earn a Masters in Fine Arts in creative writing. What are some of the benefits that going through a program has and some of the drawbacks? How about your own writing? Did getting the MFA help you?

Kline: OK, there is the “community of writers” I was hoping to touch on again. I do not think it is important at all to earn an MFA UNLESS one plans to teach in a Creative Writing program. The degree did not mean much to me (I am 67) as I did not figure to be looking for a permanent faculty position anywhere. I was encouraged to apply for the MFA program by other writers I knew in Miami who told me how much they had gotten out of meeting other writers. So being in the program, learning from other writers, both on the faculty in my classes, was more important to me than completing university requirements for the degree. The best courses for me were the literature classes in which we studied an author for an entire term. What luxury. Yet, I knew one student who dropped out of the program because she was afraid of the lit courses, if you can imagine.

Before I entered the MFA program, I was quite busy producing stories and poems that I sent out regularly and was beginning to see some of the stuff published in good places like Southern Review. For the five years, I was in the program I did not send a single poem or story anywhere. I don’t blame the program. But one of the purposes of any class in which craft is taught is to inform you of what it is you do not know and how much you have to learn, what a long way you have to go, etc. So in that respect, I wonder if my time in the MFA program was just a little bit wasted –- by me. I would not blame another for my own sloth.

Barr: There has been a charge that MFA programs mint writers who all sound alike. What do you think?

Kline: Well, Raymond Carver taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and a lot of graduates (at one time or another) sound an awful lot like him. But “sounding like” authors we respect is part of the way we learn, is it not? I have heard of writers who typed entire novels by authors they admire to try to figure out what it was the admired one was doing. An original voice is an original voice and no graduate school can change that. What graduate school does is help those who are willing to listen to understand that writing has structure and craft requirements the same as the other arts of music, art, dance, drama, etc. Most people come to writing not knowing much about what a story is or should do. A good teacher can help.

Barr: I plead guilty to typing out Kawabata’s novella, Snow Country, which I consider one of the most beautifully elegant pieces of literature that I have ever read. And when I typed it, I saw things in it that I had failed to see when I had read it twice before. You recently finished your first novel, “Freaks All Alive.” Can you tell us something about it?

Kline: I’m a bit superstitious about this. An agent I respect greatly has asked for 50 pages. Those of you who are doing this understand how important such a request can be. So I’m not going to write in this space about the book’s story.

Barr: Fair enough. How long did it take you to write the novel and how difficult was it?

Kline: I worked on the book off and on for a good five or six years. Then I got serious and worked on it steadily for another four. The book has gone through several revisions. After reading the next to last revision, an author I respect greatly suggested the first person point of view was limiting. I changed it. An agent I would love to represent the book told me that the first 30 pages had to go. That was tough, but I did it and when I did, it opened up the book in ways I could not have imagined. Now I’m done with it. If someone takes it, hooray. If it gathers dust in a drawer, I thank it for what it taught me. I am working on another book I estimate should take about 18 months to complete.

Barr: Beginnings, finding them, is always hard. What we think is the beginning may be a lot of throat clearing or may not belong in the book at all. The beginning of The Sun Also Rises comes to mind. It wasn’t how Hemingway chose to begin the novel. That was Maxwell Perkins editing. How did you go about writing the novel? Did you outline it beforehand? Did you have it workshopped?

Kline: I did close readings of authors I admire, such as Jim Harrison, Wendell Berry, Larry Brown, William Faulkner, Annie Proulx, John Dufresne, Graham Greene –- people who write literary fiction and know how to make the reader keep turning the pages. These are also people who have, with the exception of Greene, a strong rural emphasis in their fiction, which appeals to me as a reader. Also, I researched the territory of my novel, which runs from Southeastern Ohio to Central Florida. The time in which the story takes place had to be researched, such as what was in the news, popular culture, slang of the times, everything. Not that the book is saturated with atmosphere of the fifties, but I hope it sounds true when a reader gets into it.

I did try to outline it, but it was hopeless for me. I am far too interested in seeing what the characters will do on their own. I had a general idea of where I hoped the story would end, but was open to any suggestions the characters made as well. Some close friends have read parts of the novel and commented. One person has read the completed novel.

Barr: Is there anything you would advise an aspiring writer not to do?

Kline: If you can see yourself doing something more interesting to you than writing, do it. Writing is too much work for you to waste time you could more profitably use watching TV. If you really want to write, then do not stop reading. You probably got interested in writing because of your reading habit. Keep at it. Read the stuff you admire. There are many books and you needn’t feel guilty about not finishing the great ones that do not appeal to you. Somerset Maugham said that a good reader has to be a good skipper, meaning that one should not feel guilty about passing over the parts that bore you. A friend of mine who just had his first story selected for an anthology calls himself a reader with a writing habit. You must read if you want to write.

Barr: Somerset Maugham was eminently quotable, but I have caught him fudging the facts more than once. Let’s say you are talking to your brightest and most talented student. What would you advise him or her to read?

Kline: For students, I would implore them to read Aristotle’s Poetics. Keep it handy, mark it and refer to it often. Then there is the so-called canon of Western literature. Something that always surprises me anew each time I pick up a centuries-old book is how contemporary it sounds to my modern ear. If you want proof, try Dante. Try to learn something about the lives of those great writers. That will probably lead you to other works. Finally, think about what interests you. Is it sex, travel, death, money, violence, yourself, family relationships, automobile repair, farming, mountain climbing, gardening, scuba diving, sleeping, loafing, drinking, gambling? Whatever it is, look for works of fiction that include and involve your interest. See what others have lived, observed, remembered, reflected on and written.

Barr: You taught me to look in the middle of a novel for the plot point of no return, the thing that changes everything, that makes the ending inevitable. Kurt Vonnegut said that once you write past page 150 (the middle) the book starts to write itself. Do you believe this?

Kline: Absolutely. For writers reading this, I feel this is the most important question you have asked. Of course, the difficulty with my answer is that one seldom knows he has reached the middle the first time through. Or the second or third. Expect to revise. But that’s the best and most entertaining part for me, anyway. In fact, the book I am reading now, Light in August, is 480 pages long. On page 242, the first sentence of chapter 12 is: “In this way the second phase began.” It makes perfect sense when you read what goes on in the immediately preceding pages.

Barr: What has been the most influential book you have ever read?

Kline: Hard to say. I just finished Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which I picked up because I had never read it and thought I should. The book is nearly a hundred years old and yet read from our perspective, remarkably insightful about what happened in the 20th century. I go back to Faulkner a lot and am currently reading Light in August. I try to read poetry every day. Everyone should read Orwell for what he has to say about language and writing. A four volume set of his letters and essays was my birthday present to myself this past year. My love of reading stems from a book titled The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Warner Chandler, that I read when I was in the third grade. I read slowly and I always read introductions and appendices. I read the acknowledgements and the dedications. If there is a bibliography, which you rarely find in fiction, but sometimes do, I read that in hopes of being led to something new to read. I’m hopeless.

Barr: What are you working on now?

Kline: A novel about a father, a son and a grandson. But if you are looking for a story to tell, here is one I just read in my umpteenth rereading of Faulkner’s Light in August: “…a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from.” You can get a lifetime of writing books out of that. I could get at least on featuring my mother as the central character.

Barr: If you were interviewing yourself, what would you ask?

Kline: I would ask myself if I could ever see a time in my life when I would not be writing. The answer would be no.

Photo:  Leejay Kline, Lilliam Domínguez

Before he published, David Mitchell, author of Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. was a bookseller –

Before he quit England to teach in Japan, Mitchell spent a year as fiction buyer in Waterstone’s Canterbury shop. It was 1990, the heady days of shop floor power, and he revelled in the role: ‘If I happened to think very highly of Wilson Harris, Guyana’s most famous writer, then I could put his books in the window. I ordered one of every title in Faber and Faber’s catalogue, however obscure.’ Much of his time was spent reading in the shop’s basement.

The BBC interviewed him in 2004 and asked him about reading and writing –

Reading clubs are very trendy in Nottinghamshire at the moment. If you were to recommend five reads – apart from your own books – what would they be?

1. For Esme – With Love and Squalor, by J.D. Salinger.
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
3. The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.
4. Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain Fornier.
5. The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Writer’s groups are also very popular in Nottinghamshire. Have you got any advice for Nottinghamshire’s budding writers?

1. Take your time.
2. Write your characters’ autobiographies.
3. It’s about people.
4. A quote from Stephen King: “adverbs are not your friends.”
5. Write something every single day, even if it’s just three lines. And it doesn’t matter if it’s any good – just write something every day.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Source: The Book Standard website [no longer in operation], Joe Sinclair, “David Mitchell: The Interview,” BBC (Feb. 2004)

Recently, the New Yorker interviewed Philip Roth about Exit Ghost, his latest novel and possibly the last installment of the Nathan Zuckerman books.

Throughout nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Roth has written about the protagonist and writer, Nathan Zuckerman.  In the first novel, Zuckerman is in his twenties, full of sexual energy and expectation.  Exit Ghost concludes (we think) the cycle with the septuagenarian suffering from incontinence and impotence.  He has exiled himself from New York city after a lifetime of being inmersed in the “real” — no television, no newspapers — just writing and long, solitary walks.  But beware of easy conclusions.  Zuckerman is not rejecting the world or making any statements.  “I’m not out to make fiction into a political statement,” Roth said –

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that he goes into “solitary confinement,” he’s gone off to live and write in a comfortable rural retreat … His solitary way of living becomes a not unpleasant habit that satisfies his desire for a quiet, contemplative life devoted to literature. … But Zuckerman is no longer quite the man he once was, with the capacities and the stamina and the interests of the man he once was.  In his own words, he is “a no longer.”  He is over seventy, and age makes a difference — and the difference that it makes is a central subject of the novel.

Thanks to Turner Davies for the link.

Image:  Front cover of the American edition of Exit Ghost; Source:  Hermione Lee,”Age Makes a Difference: Hermione Lee talks with Philip Roth about his new novel, Exit Ghost,” The New Yorker (Oct. 1, 2007)