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 3 of 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I grew up in that world where people still talk. I think there's always this question about what makes Southern writers unique, and why there are so many on every street corner in North Carolina, and pretty good ones too. There are several reasons. One is that, if I want to have the oil changed in my car in New York, I go to the garage and I say: (feigns Bronx accent) "Hi. The Ford Taurus? Oil change. When am I going to get it? You're kidding! That's not acceptable. I'm going elsewhere." Now, in North Carolina, I go to a garage and I say (feigns an exaggerated Southern drawl): "How you doing? Boy, hot enough for you? I tell you, this time of year last year, we weren't suffering like this, were we? I declare, this air conditioner feels good. You from around here? What's your family name? I think I know her! How old is this dog? That's an old-looking dog! Eighteen? That's the oldest dog I've ever seen in my life!" And eventually you tack into why you've come. But to go directly to the subject is verboten -- it means you have a Ph.D. and you're dissing the person who's changing the oil. You haven't done what dogs do, which is sniff each other and bare their jugulars to each other and say, "I'm a dog and you're a dog." And though a lot of that is pro forma, and it really is weather conversation and natural disaster conversation, things actually get said. And more than that, the habit of exchanging information with strangers is something long established. One of the secrets of the history of the South is it was terribly underpopulated until the early 19th century, so that when people got together, by God, there was a lot to say, because you were lonely. So company was a major source of amusement, and conversation being cheap and also non-exerting in a very hot climate, it's a basic training ground. And it's clear that my work is very spoken and very musical and very much written aloud. I revise everything by ear. I read my work aloud to myself. And I think that one of the sadnesses of recent American prose is that most of it sounds like Windows 95. There is nothing individual, there is nothing biorhythmical, there is nothing inherently human in the rhythms of the prose. It's really about the cold crackling of cyberspace, that has a way of infecting everything it touches. You have to be very hot to melt that, and one way of doing it is just to read everything you write aloud over and over and over again until the music becomes your own. How are you accepted in small-town North Carolina? I'm in this little town and I'm a good citizen. Citizenship matters, and it's an underestimated pleasure. I go to town meetings and rail against development and the horrible coarsening of the landscape that's going on there, as well as everywhere else. I'm surrounded by widows in their '80s and '90s, and I try to leave them Valentine candy and flowers and food and save things and clippings. And we have this active leaving-things-on-the-front-porch thing for each other. It's very out-of-time. I mean it has nothing to do with the 21st century and everything to do with the 19th, which is fine with me since that's really where I feel happiest. It's very much like my grandparents' reality. I don't feel that I'm hiding my head in the sand. I feel that I'm participating in something that's very necessary to my health and my work, which is a small, viable community full of really interesting and intelligent people. Some of whom have never been to school, but it doesn't matter to me. What matters is that there's something very alive. And I'm respected in the community and nobody bothers me. Occasionally I'm asked once too often to come and talk to a Brownie Scout troop, but I have to work that out with people. I say, "I work until 3 o'clock, and this is my schedule, and this as valid as anybody who goes to an office, and it has to be respected." People understand. How far is this town from where you grew up? About an hour and half by car. Did you grow up in a bookish family? No. My mother had a master's degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father's family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Money-making was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But it was also a very religious family. My father was converted to fundamental evangelical Christianity when I was 9 and that was a terrible loss to us all. He'd always been sort of a rigid person, but then he became a really self-righteous dictatorial person. And the paradox is that I -- having gone to church all my life -- absorbed much, much more than I could have ever imagined. As you know, this novel ends in Paradise, but a Paradise that's been radically, sexually revised. One of the many things that I learned from sitting in those endless dreary Sunday school classes, taught by people who were unqualified to teach the Bible -- and they said that every Sunday, as if you hadn't noticed it -- is precisely that reading the King James Bible aloud over and over again, and hearing those lessons, and looking at those highly colored lithographs that were on every wall, made me understand that ordinary experience, common experience, throwing seed into the garden, or losing a valuable coin in the house and re-finding it, had immense allegorical and metaphysical significance if it was stated in a proper way. These simple truths mattered immensely, and could be lit up. And that a local reality was a universal reality if it was treated properly. And that fables mattered. Were you "out" as a gay person in high school? No, I can't say I was. It was only when I went into the Navy and got out of town that I really realized that this is going to be the way it was going to be. I love women. I mean, I'm mad about women. And some of my best friends are women! [Laughs.] Most of my best friends are women, many of my best friends. And I was always having sexual relations with women, because they were adorable and gorgeous and they were the ones I was supposed to be interested in and they were the ones who were coming forward. But when the adorable gorgeous boys started coming forward, I though, "Hmm. This really is interesting." It's an interesting paradox, being an "out" gay man in this little town. It's not something that comes up all the time. I introduce my boyfriend to people, and there he is, and here we are. There's a lot of tolerance, partly because I'm from a good family, and that's never to be underestimated. And partly because I'm a good citizen. I think I could be having sex with seven Great Danes and as long as I didn't do it in the yard nobody would really mind. That's the village ethos. Our little town has two or three village idiots that people give food to at every house because they've always done that and they're harmless, and I think every town has the town queer, and the lady gym teacher with chopped-off hair, and it's just part of the cast of characters. Did you feel more removed from your hometown during the Vietnam era? You were a conscientious objector, before you eventually enlisted. That must have raised eyebrows. Well, I felt very alien. I celebrate this little town as if it's not full of racists and Republicans and bigots and people who hate queers. And they're there. As long as they don't burn a cross on my yard or interfere with me, or let the air out of my tires, or insult me in the street, live and let live. But I was actively opposed to the war in Vietnam and knew in my heart of hearts that if I went into the Army I was going to be killed. I have real psychic capacity. Sometimes it's terrifying for me and my friends. I had this vision that if I arrived on a plane I would be killed at the airport. And when I saw, years later, "Platoon," with the plane bringing the live soldiers out one door and putting the dead soldiers on the plane, it was almost unbearable, because it was so close to what I imagined for myself. So having been forced to go into the military against my wishes, I chose the Navy. At least it was off the coast, and at least I was on water and I was avoiding that image of the airport, which I knew was going to be deadly. They were going to put you on trial because you wouldn't enlist, weren't they? Yes. There was a hearing. And what's really sad was that my late parents, being Republican, were perfectly willing to send me to Vietnam. It's amazing how many people were in favor of the war, but how many people have you heard in the last six weeks say, "I was really gung-ho about the Vietnam War"? You know, that damn thing went on for 40 years and there's not one person I've met who's willing to come forward. But yes, it was very difficult. In retrospect, are you glad in any way that you served? I can say that good things came out of it. I don't think anybody who has any wisdom regrets a minute of their life, as long as it takes you to the next minute, when things get a little better, and even when it doesn't. The good thing that came out of it was that I started writing and reading. Reading first, and writing. You've said you read 1,200 books on that ship. How did you pull that off? How did you get the books? I was very lucky in a number of ways. One was that there was a library on the USS Yorktown. I was on a carrier with 4,000 people on it. Which meant that there was a library just to keep them from killing and fucking each other in plain sight. There was a lot of fucking going on, but it was usually in the showers after midnight. And I was much too terrified to be doing that. I was in the library every night -- that was the only game in town. It was so long ago that there were no televisions on the ship. Imagine 4,000 men, ages 18 to 23, with a couple of 55-year-olds in charge, floating around in the South China sea for 35 days without even seeing the land. And just the mischief and the energy and the volatility and the testosterone and the erotic swill. The only way I could stay sane was to find something to do. I had been a painter, I had gone to art school for a year, but painting was not exactly a career option on a carrier. I had my sketch book and I had a journal and I had license to check out those books. And I had the amazing good fortune to find Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady," which was the first novel that I just remember the sensation of suspended breath. Entering this world that was so familiar and alien and magical. And thinking the way I had thought when I was a painter and I was looking at Cezanne and thought, "I can do that" -- which was complete bullshit. But of course, what you don't know won't hurt you. And so I would write imitations of James or Dickens or Balzac. I'd try to write a middle chapter out of a Henry James novel, and then a chapter out of Balzac. And I really taught myself how to write. But I taught myself how to write 19th century prose. Everything was subject-verb, then the next sentence would begin with a dependent clause and the subject and verb withheld. It was very antique and very endearing and insular and weepy in the way all autodidactic people really are. And very earnest, militantly earnest, the way we self-taught are. It was only when I got out of the Navy and went to Sarah Lawrence to work with Grace Paley ... I did have the wit to see that Grace Paley was, along with Cheever and Stanley Elkin, one of the great writers of the period. She's phenomenal. There's nobody working who has more purity and originality than Grace does. And I showed Grace one of my 19th century stories and she said, "Oh honey. People aren't doing this kind of thing now. This is really, really good, but hey, it's now, it's not about this so much. It's about ..." I've always wished I could have her exact words, but she said it's about how people get along, and what they have to do to stay alive, and what they've sacrificed, and what they choose to save. And I was 22, and I just said, "Oh, OK." And I went back to my room and spent two days writing what I think is in some ways the first real thing I wrote, which was published in a now-defunct magazine. It was a series of family vignettes about a -- to say a dysfunctional family is redundant, every family is -- but about family's betrayals and compromises and mythologies and romances. And I just started. But I'm eternally grateful for that three and a half years of 19th century rhetorical preparation. It's a great image. You on the ship with 4,000 men, lost in some Jamesian daze. Did you catch flak for your bookishness? Well, they found it useful in some ways. I was sometimes called Professor, the way uneducated people call people with glasses Doc or Professor. But it meant that I could help write letters for many of the men. No surprise, many of the guys on the ship who were high school dropouts were functionally illiterate. This was the only job they could get, because they were big and healthy and could take orders. So I wound up writing romantic erotic letters to women all over the world, wives and mothers. It was very powerful. I've written a novella about it. It was a very powerful kind of erotic tie. Frequently I'd be writing sexy letters dictated by a man that I really, really wanted sexually, but didn't dare approach. And I would begin putting words in his mouth and writing -- very much Cyrano de Bergerac -- writing these wildly romantic letters that became increasingly erotically specific. I was interviewing them about what they had and hadn't done, and how that could apply. I'm getting turned on just thinking about it. It became this profound connection, and sometimes these guys -- I would not call them rocket scientists -- would bring their wives' letters to me to open, and I would read them to them. And the letters would say, "Dear Rocky, I never knew you were such a poet. You made me so wet last night when I read ..." It became this very heady kind of experience. So in some ways my finding my own power in prose came not only from writing these imitations of 19th century fiction, but of being the ventriloquist for these beautiful dummies who were all around me. John Cheever was one of your mentors, as well as Paley. You are a figure in his journals; he had erotic feelings for you. Has all the investigation into Cheever's personal life -- he has even become a joke on "Seinfeld" -- bothered you? All I can say is that I feel lucky to have been born when I was born. Because I think if I'd been born even 10 years earlier -- John was 40 years older, I guess -- I would probably have a wife and three kids. I came very close. And the pathos ... Cheever is in the pantheon. The best of those stories are as good as anything that's been written in the century. And he was, pound-for-pound, the best company imaginable. He was so entertaining, he was so wonderful, so alive and to the moment. He was so present and jokey and just alert. And if he liked you and loved you, as he loved me -- what he gave was just immensely beautiful. What I didn't understand at the time, being 24 -- it's so easy not to know what's going on when you're 24, very few people do at that age -- is that he really genuinely loved me. And I know that now, as a 50-year-old man, who's capable of reading a 65-year-old man about a 24-year-old boy, and saying, "It was not just that he kept putting his hand on my knee, and wanted me to come upstairs," which I resisted every step of the way. Partly because he was 65 and I was 24, and he was alcoholic, and he had just had a major heart attack, and he looked like hell and he was nearly dead. He killed himself and his liver was like a pistachio nut. But partly because I understood that with bisexual men of the period, the ethos is that it's easy to blame the victim. You try to get a man to sleep with you, and if he does, than he's the faggot and you're not. I knew in my heart that I had to resist his importuning, partly because I felt that I had a separate destiny as a writer, and I didn't want to be the boy who's having dinner with John Cheever all the time who happens to write sensitive short stories. And his pathos, the pathos of his circumstance, of being proud of his children, and he was immensely proud of all of them, with good reason I think, and proud of his beautiful and intelligent wife, despite their difficulties, which became the subject of so much of his fiction. I wouldn't have been in his situation for anything, because he was a person who was very erotically driven and mainly driven, I think, toward men, at least in the period that I knew him. And possibly blocked by being recognized, and by his own stoical New England embarrassment. Those journals are remarkable literature. Do you agree with the people who think they may be his most lasting work? I think they're very important. And he wrote them for posterity. People ask, "Should they have been published?" Well, you read that prose, and it's prose as written for publication. When we were so close, when he was my teacher at Iowa he was living in the university hotel, which was just a pit, and drinking from half gallon bottles and going to the liquor store on Monday morning at 8 a.m. when it opened, he and Raymond Carver sitting in the car with trembling hands waiting for the store to open ... I hardly drink, I don't smoke. If I've learned anything from my teachers, it's that. I have my own vices, but being a workaholic is a much better deal. But he said to me, "If I die," and it was a distinct possibility, because he was very close to dying, "I've given your name to the hotel, and I have instructed them to call you any hour of the day or night, if I'm found, and as soon as you get the call, I want you to come and get these journals out of here, because I'm afraid they'll fall into the wrong hands." And he showed me black spiral, three-ring notebooks, that were three inches thick with journal entries. He wrote them every morning, to get himself going. And the heroism of drinking an immense amount of Scotch and weighing 110 pounds and getting up at the age of 65 in this exile in the Middle West, you have to remember, he was writing "Falconer" then, I didn't know what the name of the book was then, but he was writing something. And that was his last great comeback, that was his great triumph. Here was this great writer in exile, writing his life out and saving a lot out in the journals. So I think there's a lot of reason to believe he saw that as his legacy, and it's the one place where, unlike fiction, he could be radically honest. And I think he really was. He was a dear, dear person. His generosity to me, as somebody who wouldn't sleep with him -- it's easier to be nice to people who will than it is to the ones who won't -- was just immense. And his selling my story "Minor Heroism" to the New Yorker, without my knowing it, is probably the kindest thing anybody's ever done for me. I was amazed. I thought I was years away from being ready for publication. He knew better. SALON | Dec. 8, 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A L S O Untethered ego By Laura Miller 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." (12/08/97)