T A B L E+T A L K Which sentences from literature do you wish you had written? Discuss your writer's envy in the Books section of Table Talk T O D A Y Untethered ego Mark Leyner talks about how humor is underrated, how no one believes in fiction and how he (and an ape) are the real authors of "Infinite Jest." By Laura Miller (12/08/97) R E C E N T L Y Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) Caleb Carr By Dwight Garner (10/04/97) Arundhati Roy By Reena Jana (09/30/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Tribes of Palos Verdes By Joy Nicholson A tough-minded first novel, narrated by a misfit high school girl who finds solace in surfing the Southern California coast (12/08/97)		Allan Gurganus page 2 of 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Has the book's comic tone rankled anyone? People have been very responsive, and I think people are grateful for it. The pietistic, politically correct, afraid-to-offend-anybody belief that one minority group can only write about itself, for itself, frequently at the expense of every other minority group, is not where I'd ever want to be. My goal in writing the book was to speak to both gay people who survived the pandemic and straight people who have no direct experience. So that a woman in Moline, Ill., could actually read the book and not know any gay people except maybe her hairdresser, who doesn't talk much and doesn't tell much, and really understand what an amazing adventure this whole decade and a half offered us. I think it's typical of our insane, bankrupt culture that the heroism of the period is not what people remember. They remember the corruption and the epidemiology of the period. But for me it will always be a great mark of pride to have been part of that community that gave up full-time jobs to take care of friends, that used all our media savvy, all our intellect, all our bankrolls to step into this immense void that was created when the bankrupt leadership of Ronald Reagan slashed the minute amount of money being spent on figuring out what this virus was and how we would stop it. It will be left to future historians to look back and vilify properly those people who cut the budget. And it's left to us to wonder how many tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of lives could have been saved. But in that breach I saw the most selfish disco queens become Clara Barton and Mother Teresa. It was magical. It was an unbelievable transformation. You personally devoted many years to taking care of sick friends. Do those years feel lost to you as a writer? I'm going to do the writing now. There are immense advantages to living through a war -- and that's really what I've done. I'm both a Vietnam vet and a vet of this period in New York, so I've got purple hearts coming out of my yin-yang. In the Fitzgerald-Faulkner-Hemingway era, they were spoiling to get abroad into a war because that meant that they'd have something to write about. And boy, do I have something to write about. I'm only 50, and I feel a novelist begins life at 40. So I'm only 10, really. I'm just getting my sea legs. I have a lot of energy and I have a tremendous sense of commitment. I don't have a career, I have a mission. I'm from a long line of ministers, so I've applied my status as the black sheep -- the fallen, queer one -- to transforming myself into the ultimate pulpit-pounder. One of your heroes, Walt Whitman, also spent many years taking care of dying men. In his case it was the Civil War. I learned an immense amount about him by living through this myself. Using him as an example, somewhat self-destructively, I kept thinking: Why am I so tired and why does he look so serene? He spent four years living in boarding houses, and going to the hospital, and spending 20 hours a day with dying boys. And it seems not to cost him what it's costing me. He seems to have no wishes to be doing something else, no resentments to the cruelties that dying friends visit on the people who are caring for them most closely. And then afterwards -- in that sweet, still afterwards -- I read more seriously about Whitman and realized that essentially he had ruined his own health taking care of other people. He had contracted a virus from gangrene by virtue of helping with an amputation. And he said, you know, "My health ended with the war." And when you look at the photographs of him and realize that what looks like an 80-year-old man was actually a 48-year-old man, you see what that kind of suffering -- being around that grade of suffering and that grade of drama -- really cost him. I mean, talk about melodrama. To have three friends in their 20s die within two weeks of each other and to be taking care of them while nursing your parents and trying to hold it all together with no medical experience but what you gained by figuring out how to work a hospital, and how to subvert the nurses and flatter them and how to get the towels yourself -- it's an immense advantage to know all this at 50 instead of waiting to find it out at 75. So I feel that whatever time I lost in terms of titles, I have in terms of hard-won experience and useful experience. You describe Hartley, when he first arrives in New York, as a "bottom-feeding hick." Is that how you felt about yourself when you first came here? The beautiful thing about writing fiction is that you can use aspects of your own experience and transform them. Which also means simplifying them. I think Hartley is simpler than I am, he's less driven than I am, and he's kinder than I am. But there are certainly things that we have in common. At the very time that he professes to have lost his innocence to New York and to the wild rush of experience, I intend for the reader to understand that his innocence is irrefutable. Just as Lucy Marsden, in "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow," is a believer despite everything that must happen to her. And for me, it's that quality of belief, Hartley's belief in the genius of his friends, in the possibility of making art, in the possibility of immortality, in the possibility even of happiness, which may be the greatest stretch of all. Sometimes it's easier to believe in immortality than in present happiness. So that quality of belief is precisely what protects him and makes him the ideal Nick Carroway narrator [ed. note: Nick Carroway is the uncorrupted narrator of F. Scott Fiztgerald's "The Great Gatsby"] for the novel. I think he is a hick, but only in the way that New York defines a hick, as somebody who doesn't know the streets and subways and somebody who is still open to feeling. Some of the reviews of the novel say, "This is a great book despite its occasional sentimentality." Bullshit. There's no sentimentality in this book. I've gone so far out of my way to avoid anything that's intentionally four-hankie-movie or bathetic. And the humor is what gets the book through and that's what got us through. The jokes -- you're trying to move a friend, you drop the friend and he's laughing, you're laughing -- it's the only way to survive. And so I feel sort of invincible in understanding that what New York calls sentimental is what other people call feeling. New Yorkers are embarrassed by genuine, overt, operatic emotion. They'll go to the opera, which is about a woman stabbing a dictator to avenge the death of her brother, and talk only about the singer's vocal technique. This weird kind of necessary detachment in order to go forward and be the kind of Sherman tank that you have to be in this context. And one of the things that I'm really grateful for in living where I am, in this little town, is that I can have moments during the day of just being transparent as a pane of glass. I mean, I can feel protected enough by my house just to disappear in my thoughts. And in New York there's always honking, there's always the car alarm, there's always the crazy neighbor, there's always the imperative to go out and enjoy yourself. For me it's been a merciful chord change. Is it different now for young gay men who come to New York? New York is one of those necessary addictions that not everybody gets, but those of us who have it, you know ... I remember the first time I saw New York. I was running away from home. I'd been hit by my father, one of many times, and I had like $35, and I checked it all out of the bank and just walked right to the bus station and got on the bus to New York. I remember waking up on the bus and seeing the skyline through the cornrows of a fat lady who'd fallen asleep beside me. There was this sort of plaid of these horizontal cornrows and these vertical skyscrapers. And it was like an erection. For me, that's the image of New York. New York is like colossal silver dildos standing at attention. I just thought: Ah, now I'm home. This is it, this is mine, this is me, this is where I'll find others like me. And I was right. And the tragedy of losing them so soon after finding them is the fueling injustice at the center of the book. It's also the source of fossil fuel and the source of the comedy of the book. I just think it's a subject that's so colossal and so medieval really. You've said that humor, in times of crisis, becomes holy. I would make the distinction between comedy and jokes -- between comedy and schtick. You see stand-up comics who make you laugh, and it's like a series of 14 mousetraps going off one after another. And immediately after the snap you have no memory of what's been said. That's different from humor, which is a way of perceiving the universe. That instantaneous recognition that it's not going to work and the laugh that comes as a result. Charlie Chaplin has a bouquet of flowers which he's stolen from every garden in the neighborhood, and as he's approaching his beloved object he slips on the banana peel. We laugh with pity and derision and profound recognition about how difficult the world is. So, for me, that comic stance is Borsch Belt humor, it's black humor, it's gay humor, homeopathic gay humor which says you can't be more savage about my being a pansy than I will be. I will be so preemptively cruel to myself that nothing you can say can touch me. I will be such a bitch that you can't hurt me, and I will be so outrageous and artificial that you can't miss me. It's a weird kind of magic. It's a weird kind of superstition. But there's a kind of power in it. And I've found over and over in life that trapped in an elevator, literally trapped in an elevator, or in a difficult social situation, at a funeral or a wedding, that a joke, however conventional and inept, is the thing that dispels the tension and let's everybody go on living. In some ways my great preparation for writing this novel was writing so many eulogies. Partly because I was born talking -- as you can probably hear -- and will die talking, I hope, and because I'm a writer, my friends would say weeks before they died: "I have one request." And of course you'd say, "Anything." And they'd say, "Do the eulogy." And you can't say, "Well, that comes at a bad career time for me." You say, "I will honey and I'll tell the whole truth and nothing but, if you can take it. As long I can talk about your faults as well as your merits." And they said, "Dish, dish, dish, I'm not going to worry about anything." What I found, in getting up in these little churches and fellowship halls, some in the South and Midwest, was that the more honest I was about the faults of the dead person, and the peccadilloes and the outrageous things, and the extreme opinionatedness of these people, the more laughs I got. And the more laughs I got, the better people felt and the more present the missing person became in the spirit dimension and hovering over our heads. And the greater service I had done to them in terms of portraiture and to the people who gathered to remember them. So when it came time to write a novel, and to invent characters ... Angie and Robert and Hartley are all inventions that are based on 40 people each, and everybody I've ever read about, and also, maybe most crucially, all the friends I've wished I'd had. You know, kids start out with this fantasy playmate. I think every intelligent and profoundly imaginative kid can tell you the name of his or her phantom playmate. The person who would say, "There, there," when you go back to your room and cry, or the person who wakes up in the morning and says, "Let's go explore." And the person you blame when something has gone wrong. Those fantasy playmates are now on the page. Because Robert and Angie are not only the friends that I had -- Angie the ultimate career artist in New York who will sacrifice everything to be immortal, and does, and Robert who is the most spectacular head-turning beauty in the history of the city for 10 years. They're the people that I knew and also was near enough to want to have known better but couldn't, and they become these kind of totemic composite Whitmanesque souls that become representative of all those people that I partied with, and talked to, and fucked, and enjoyed, and whose work I was in awe of. We did some wonderful work. As I say in the novel, "The dirty secret of the period is just how hard we worked." We all did a lot of woodshedding. All of these characters are so certain of their eventual success. Yet Hartley, in this book, never makes it as a writer. I think that in some ways Hartley's appropriateness as the teller of the tale comes precisely in his being a mythomaniac about other people and not himself. In some ways that makes him unfit to live in New York. Because everybody in New York has to say to the greengrocer, when he says, (feigns Korean accent) "Hello, how you doing mister?" -- "Fabulous. I have an audition later. Hal Prince is just champing at the bit but I said, 'Hal, look, I'm booked.'" They will show head shots on the subway. And that's a necessary and -- if you can learn to look at it properly -- endearing trait, that I think Hartley lacks. What Hartley shows is head shots of his friends. Which is precisely what makes him the ideal person to tell the story. I have a fantasy that I might eventually do other books with Hartley as the center, and maybe run Hartley over some of the ground I've covered since this happened. But I think he's a kind of ideal neutral ethical center for the book, very much the way Nick Carroway is in "The Great Gatsby." A believer in decency and taking care of, and writing thank-you notes, even to the real estate agent who's just raped you. So it's that equanimity and that generosity of vision and that narrow vision that precisely makes him right for the role. You are working on an autobiography, aren't you? I have lots of books in progress. I have a book called "Never Weaken," which is closer to the actual facts of my life than any of the fiction I've done. I ask that question because I'm wondering if this book scratches your autobiographical itch, and perhaps makes your autobiography redundant. I think the material is inexhaustible. When I finished this book, I wrapped it up in gift wrapping and FedExed it to my editor here, Dan Frank, and slept for three days. And then I woke up and I thought, "I could start over." I mean, I could write six books about the same material, and tell something new about the experience every time. But I love this book. I love the Chip Kidd cover with its kind of toylike, playful quality. And I think of the book as, like, kids let loose in F.A.O. Schwartz without the security guards. That, for us, was really what New York was. To be great looking and really, really intelligent, and wide-eyed and genuinely talented, not just saying that you want to be a writer some day, but genuinely working. And genuinely encouraging each other. It really was like a jungle gym. Having great friends in New York is like having great friends on an expedition into Darkest Africa in the early 19th century. You need them. And you need sponsorship on a daily basis. I have a painter friend here who says, "I need two compliments a day just to break even." And we gave them to each other, and we got them, and honestly got them. And so when the darkness hit us, there was a weird kind of propulsive forward motion, which I really try very hard in the book to imitate. So that when we really hit the first case of a loved one coming down with it, it's like a locomotive hitting the wall. You just think, "No. Not us. It could happen to friends of friends, and it could be a rumor, but it can't be a fact." You've led a public life. You're famous for your readings and lectures, and you're politically active. You're a great talker. Do you ever worry about talking away your prose? No, I don't worry about it. For me, speaking, publicly speaking and speaking out on political issues which matter immensely to me, and reading from the book, and writing the books are all a part of the same thing. I think it's a false distinction to say that conversation and composition are separate. Because even as we speak, I'm seeing. Every interview is different, and I'm finding new ways to talk about ancient preoccupations. And I sometimes come on something that's immensely helpful and valuable. Plus I like the sensation of conversation. N E X T+P A G E +| Why Southerners talk so damn much