Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (34 page)

Is that the great lie of the cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement. That’s the sort of thing that it’s about. And yeah, my little corner of that experience, some of this had to do with the writing, you know? I can remember being twenty-four years old and having my, you know, smiling mug in the
New York Times Magazine
, and it feeling really good for exactly like ten seconds. You know?

Magazine?

I’m sorry—
The New York Times Book Review
. Or, the big one also, some pointillist drawing of me in the
Wall Street Journal
, and some article like, “Hot Shot’s Weird New Novel” or something like that. And I remember that coming out when I was at Yaddo. (“Yahdo”) [He has the reformed person’s apparent responsibility to feel contempt for the person he’d been then.]

And feeling real cool, because you know all of them were reading it in the living room and stuff. But it feeling intensely good, and probably not unlike a
crack
high. You know? Intensely good for thirty seconds, and then you’re hungry for more. And so that, clearly, I mean if you’re not stupid, you figure out that the real problem is the discontented self. That all this stuff that you think will work for a second, but then all it does is set up a hunger for more and better.

And that the thing that interested me, at least in the book, and I know it’s less interesting for the purposes of your essay [By now calling it an “essay,” which is what he writes. Interesting], is that that general pattern and syndrome seems to me to get repeated, at least in our culture, for our kind of plush middle-class part of the culture, over and over and over again in a million different arenas. And that we don’t seem to get it. We do
not
seem to get it.

This is just for color; so the fact that you’ve gotten the readership that
you might have wanted in your midtwenties … quote from Self-Consciousness: photograph Updike sees of himself in his mother’s house, as a five-year-old boy, which now looks kind of sinister. “I’m what you wanted me to be,” you know what I mean? “You got me into this: now what do I do? I await his instructions.” I mean, in a sense, you fulfilled the ambitions that twenty-five-year-old had in terms of the kind of impact you wanted to make …

You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded.

But there is, you’re right, once you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because like you said [three days ago, in airport], you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part of yourself, but … that isn’t at its mercy, you know?

Started writing fiction when how old?

Twenty-one.

Never before?

I think I started a World War Two novel when I was nine. [I laugh.]

And abandoned?

Yeah, well, it was about a bunch of people with
strangely
hyperdeveloped skills and powers, who are going to invade Hitler’s bunker during World War Two. And I remember I started it after seeing something called
Kelly’s Heroes
, or maybe
The Dirty Dozen
or something. And it was very much a project inspired by the experience of liking that movie. And once that … I mean, so yeah, I really started
when I was twenty-one, and I started because—it was actually Mark kinda got me into it.

Well, I’d done some stuff—when I was in college, I’d written a couple of papers for other people. Because there were a lot of students who … it was kind of neat.

They were paying you to write their papers?

Well, I wouldn’t put it that coarsely. But let’s say there were complicated systems of reward. But—and it didn’t happen a whole, whole lot of the time. But I remember one of the things that was interesting was reading two or three of their papers to learn, you know, what their music sounded like.

And I remember realizing at the time, “Man, I’m really
good
at this. I’m a weird kind of forger. I mean, I can
sound
kind of like anybody.” Or I would write papers for professors that would parody the stuff that the professors had said—I mean, that’d sound just like them, only more so.

Nabokov called that the ability to do blue magic
.

Yeah. And it was weird, because I remembered that I’d always wanted to be an impressionist, vocally. But I just didn’t, I don’t have an agile enough vocal and facial register to do it. Although I can do it.

Mark and I resuscitated an old humor magazine that had been dormant for a couple of years—

What were your impressions?

I can do, um, I can do Scooby-Doo, I can do Dudley Do-Right, and I can do a really good James Carter.

Do one for me?

How would this play in the piece?

[He does one; it’s not great.]

How many papers?

I wasn’t Michael Pemulis: The number of times I did this, you could count on one hand.

Was it money?

Come on …

So we did this humor magazine, and I really liked it, and then Mark …

[The tape side runs out.

We’re out of tapes; Dave finds me one belonging to an ex-girlfriend. It’s an old step-aerobics mix tape that says “Step!” We tape over.]

In this class we read
Ada
, and we read
Gravity’s Rainbow
, we read a bunch of Barthelme, anyway stuff like this.

And see ’cause, there were literati on campus, but they were these
sensitive
, you know like, politically correct—yeah, the beret guys.

And I just—boy, I remember, one reason I
still
don’t like to call myself a writer is that I don’t ever want to be mistaken for that type of person … Uuuh! Yeah, I think on East Coast colleges, with their little campus magazines, and their little infighting about who’s gonna get it, and it’s just
Uh!
The vanity speaks so stark.

[One of his strengths: he judges and speaks like a Midwesterner, a kid’s offhand slang, that’s inside all the intelligence, it’s the cement base under its field.]

Um, but anyway, we got really into that, and then Mark, Mark had always kind of written fiction. And he wrote a thesis, he wrote a creative thesis in the English department. And by this time, he was a year ahead of me, because I took a year off from college to drive a school bus.

Why?

God. I wasn’t very happy, I wasn’t very happy there. And I felt kind of inadequate. And there was a lot of stuff I wanted to read that wasn’t part of any reading class. And Mom and Dad were just totally cool, it was pretty clear I wasn’t fucking off. They just let me take a year off, live at home and drive a school bus. And I read, pretty much everything that I’ve read was read during that year.

Anyway, OK, I was majoring in philosophy, and it was serious, I mean, I was on a career track.

[Wouldn’t it be great to fall in through this transcript, back to that house, and tell him to live differently, explain to him how it was all going to go? It’s suddenly odd that this isn’t possible.]

Anyway, Mark went ahead and wrote a novel for his English thesis, and I didn’t know that this was possible, that you could get
sanctioned
to actually. And there were big writers there at the time. Brad Leithauser was there. Marilynne Robinson was there. And you could get these people to read it and like help you. And Mark sort of blazed that trail.

And that spring I took a workshop—the only undergraduate one I’ve ever had—from a man named Alan Lelchuk. Right,
American Mischief
. Safe to say that he and I didn’t hit it off. But anyway I took that class, and actually, I liked a couple of the other students, there were a couple of other students who were incredibly good, who’re now, like, teaching at Catholic schools in New York and L.A. So I just kind of eased into it.

And then I thought I would just sort of do this, because the philosophy thesis I was gonna do looked really hard and I was really scared about it, and I thought I would do this jaunty thing. Kind of like a side—I figured it would be like a hundred-page thing. And
Broom of the System
, the first draft of it was like seven hundred pages long. It was written in like five months, and it was just this very weird, it was sorta like it had, I had …

A whole lot of stuff coming together. I mean, there was a lot more theoretical stuff in the first draft of that. That, and the mimicry, and the like, the sort of adulation I’d felt for what these guys could do that we were reading in the reading group. Oh—and there was a professor there named Andy Parker who was really into theory, and a lot of us were under his sway, and he agreed to be on my committee. And he’s the one who introduced me to Manuel Puig.

It was just—a whole lot of weird things came together. And that was actually a big deal, because I was really supposed to go to philosophy grad school. And nothing had ever been said in my family, and my dad, my dad would have limbs removed without anesthetic before ever pushing his kids about anything. But I
knew
I was gonna have to go to grad school—there’s no way, in my family, you
don’t
go to grad school. But I applied to these English programs instead, you know. And I didn’t tell anybody. In the spring.

It was weird, because the philosophy thesis, it actually went really well, we worked with this Hampshire professor. He’s the one who really said, “Are you out of your mind? You can get this thing published, and you can get a
job
, while you’re still in grad school. You’re like totally stupid.” But it was really weird: ’cause I really liked this. I mean, writing
Broom of the System
felt like it was using 97 percent of me, whereas the philosophy thesis was using 50 percent of me. It was real …

Surprised by ability to actually turn out a novel?

Yeah, and how fast it was, and that the professors really liked it. You jump plateaus a little bit. I mean, I got radically better, um, like the summer before my senior year, I just got
a lot
better, I don’t know how. And then, it was several years before I got any better at all.

Ah—here’s something you might be interested in. Part of the despair of ’89 was that there was a certain way this had mirrored a tennis career for me. Which was, I started at twelve, which is fairly late, and improved exponentially. So that by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, it was not implausible that I could actually, you know, do well enough at regionals to get to nationals. You know, like really
be
in
the junior show. And, but at
just
the point that it became important to me, I began to choke.

Which, I don’t know if you’ve played enough sports to know. But in certain sports—probably baseball, basketball, where you’re like shooting, or golf—where choking has this really paradoxical, the more scared you get, the worse you play. I always imagine football is the one sport where you can just develop this kind of head of testosterone-fueled rage. You know, if you’re a three-hundred-pound
lineman
, do you have on games and off games? But stuff like pool, tennis, or these sort of precision things where you’re really on some times and not others? Nothing keeps you from being on like this fear. And the fear for me would be a consequence of it being important to, like, my identity or whatever. And then what I saw in ’89, that, “Jesus, it’s the same thing all over again.” That I’d started somewhat late—right? Twenty-one. Didn’t know I wanted to be a writer. Showed tremendous promise. But then, the minute I felt the implications of that promise, it caved in. And I sort of saw a kind of cycle about that. And any time you’ve got echoes of trauma and shit from childhood going on in adulthood, that’s part of the whole, “I’m trapped, I can’t get out” stuff. So …

Kick reading reviews of Broom?

It was just—you know what, it was creepy. Just because, I’ll tell you what: here’s the deal. I didn’t feel much of anything, except, looking back, that was on purpose. Because I was doing, I was smoking
enormous
amounts of pot. I was—it was the only time in my life that I’d like gone to bars and picked up women that I didn’t even know and tried to … which is pretty unlike me. And a lot of that I think was just, I had enough stuff going on so that I didn’t … And it’s weird. At the time I think I would tell everybody it was really nice and I was thrilled. But it was very upsetting. It was very upsetting.

Spring of ’87
.

Yeah. I had started to kind of live weirdly before then.

Bad feedback at Arizona? You’d applied with Broom?

The portfolio I sent them was some fairly realistic chunks of that and two fairly long other pieces. And
Broom
was written mostly between September and February of ’84, ’85. So …

I rewrote it, I rewrote one part …

I workshopped a bunch of stories, maybe three or four of them—actually there was this tremendous thrill. I remember writing a story called “Here and There,” which really wasn’t all that good. But for Penner, that first semester, and Penner just absolutely hating it. And that I think ended up, that won um, I think that won an O. Henry. [“Here and There,”
Prize Stories 1988: The O. Henry Awards
.] And it was all I could do not to, you know, send him the jacket of the book. I mean, to do something really like that, because he had hurt my feelings.

I had the same experience …

[Professor disliked a story, went into New Yorker, then Best American Short Stories.]

While you were in school? Then what’re you asking
me
for? Just transpose your experiences onto me. ’Cause it must have been exactly the same …

Piece isn’t about me
.

Yeah, but what’d it feel like to you, I’m curious?

It felt exciting and frightening?