An Interview with Howard Norman

Howard Norman is the author of five books of fiction and two books of nonfiction. In 1987 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award and was nominated for a National Book Award for The Northern Lights, an award he was again nominated for in 1994 for The Bird Artist. His other works of fiction include: Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad, The Museum Guard, and most recently The Haunting of L. His works of nonfiction include My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries & Preoccupations and In Fond Remembrance of Me. Norman has also published eight books for children and many translations. He has won a Lannan Literary Award for fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received his MA from Indiana University and teaches at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington , D.C. , and Vermont with his wife and daughter.

In the autumn of 2004 I met with the author while he was in Kalamazoo to give a reading at Western Michigan University . We talked for two hours over coffee and scones at the home of his close friend, the writer Stuart Dybek, then followed up over the next few months through surface mail.

I gather from what I’ve read and heard about you that your decision to become a writer was not an automatic one, that, in fact, it may have even taken some arm-twisting. What were you interested in as a kid and younger man, and how did those interests evolve into a writing life?

I’m fifty-five, and a few years ago my mother gave me some notebooks that I kept in sixth, seventh and eighth grades. Why she waited that long, I have no idea. I read through these notebooks and discovered that I was chronicling life from some sense of remove, even back then. I don’t remember doing this, but the notebooks are filled with conversations I’d apparently eavesdropped in on. Possibly I made them up, but I doubt it. These notebooks perhaps constitute a foreshadowing of a writing life. I do recall looking forward to coming home after school in order to interact socially, not with friends, but through writing about people. My mother verifies this. Pretty much right after supper I’d go into my room and write in these notebooks. They were just school exercise notebooks. Much of the writing consisted of letters to girls. It was a private kind of epistolary life, unrequited, of course, because they were letters never sent. These missives were upwards of fifteen pages. Replete with self-deprecating riffs. But what does it all mean? That I had early on developed a kind of vicariousness toward my own life? Possibly. Not the life I was living, but the life I wanted to live. Perhaps that is where writing starts. Imagining oneself out of one’s life. It has to be different for each writer.

Later, when I started working in Canada , I wrote primarily field reports and articles on natural history. In my late teens and early twenties, my model was Edward Lear. He was a brilliant bird artist. He traveled. He reported back from remote places. He remained independent. He kept his own counsel. He prodigiously wrote letters. He was ill a lot and considered himself a kind of grotesque, as his self-portraits show. Edward Lear meant something to me. He offered a certain sense of possibility. Then there was I suppose what might be called a literary “apprenticeship,” entirely outside of academia, because I was working with arctic folklore. The plots structures, voices, wild incident, they were all very compelling to me. In 1977, I worked with an Anglo-Japanese woman, Helen Tanizaki, in Churchill , Manitoba . She introduced me to, and began in a general sense to tutor me in areas that eventually became my own pre-occupations: Japanese novels, birds, translations. I’ve just finished what I guess can be categorized as a memoir. It’s called In Fond Remembrance of Me and it’s about the time I spent around Helen Tanizaki. She died
of stomach cancer. I tried to make it a literary séance. You want to hear the voices.

When I moved to Cambridge , Massachusetts , on a whim, really, I met my future wife, Jane Shore . Jane was already a well established poet. She had worked with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. She had known Jonathan Galassi, who is now my editor. Cambridge in the seventies was a great time for her. Recently, in fact, for Jane’s birthday I got her the Cartier-Bresson photograph of Robert Lowell. It was one of the last photographs he signed. Anyway, Jane encouraged me—the word hardly suffices—to write fiction. I had wanted to. And then I tried. I didn’t quite know where to go next, but at least I had a stepping-off place.

You published your first novel, The Northern Lights, when you were thirty-eight years old.

By today’s standards that perhaps is a late age for a first novel. But I came to writing novels more as an extension of other writing than as a self-generated idea of myself as a novelist. Though I envy writers who did otherwise. I might have earlier on had the capacity for writing novels, but not the industry or focus. I was writing other things to make a living. I always wrote, but between 1987 and now, novels. I certainly feel the novel I’m writing now—What Is Left the Daughter—will be my last one. By choice. Not my last book, however. I have in mind three short memoirs, or recollections. One has to do with childhood, seeing my absent father through a bookmobile window eleven times one summer; the last time he was holding up the apothecary. One has to do with getting in over my head with money, because I had bid on a piece of bird art worth far more than what I had in the bank. It will also be about love, and other circumstances. That book will be a compilation of journals kept over thirty-five or so years of visits to Point Reyes, California, the place I’ve always gone, in fact, when feeling over my head. The third has to do with failed film projects and a chronicle of, one hopes, a more so-called successful one, The Bird Artist which seems—and seems is always the operative term in that business—to be going into production in Iceland this summer. But of course, plaited into an account of failed film projects are hundreds of incidents and anecdotes of life in remote Canada.

As for saying a book is a last novel, so what? If you speak out of a certain spiritual entropy, a certain exhaustion, a certain lowered opinion of oneself, then such predictions are suspect. But I never felt I’d keep writing novels. I simply felt I’d keep writing. And it’s very, very interesting to apply novelistic structure and thought and even narrative strategy to nonfiction.

Your early published books were collections of translations from arctic languages. Would you consider that work a foundation for your work as a whole? Is there any sense of indebtedness?

I love doing translation work. I do less and less, though recently I returned to some Inuit poems. I had early and ongoing encouragement from William Merwin and Jerry Rothenberg. Very strong encouragement. I feel indebted to them. And I feel indebted to translation not for influential subject matter as much as for offering a certain discipline, certain habits of persistence, a kind of intense engagement with language. As it regards later writing, especially. Finally, though, I had to work through and well past mythology and folklore if I was to even modestly have my own voice. That took quite a while.

Having said that, I feel obligated to emphasize that the demographics of translation, where in the arctic and subarctic I was allowed to live and work with recondite languages, introduced me to certain types of people. People who preferred the outback, to use an Australian reference. People who, already living in remote places, chose, at a certain point, to become even more remote. That type of person was influential in thinking about certain fictional characters. In that regard, I am beholden to my early work in translation. But that was very practical, very utilitarian. I was hired out. I thought in my late teens and early twenties it would be my life’s work. That I would hire out to museums. That I’d report back from remote locales in a personal manner. That geographical distance might somehow engender the perfect kind of objectivity in my work. Edward Lear—the bird artist, the prodigious letter writer—was a kind of model for me. I remember at some point thinking I’d start a new genre of writing, epistolary travel writing. Travel reports in letters. Well, one could see that as a search for a form for fiction as well, but at the time I didn’t realize it. I’d still like to write a completely epistolary work.

In the end, I had to finally separate myself from the themes, let alone the linguistic structures and tonalities of arctic mythology. In fact, the first fiction I ever wrote, which I tossed out, was more or less recapitulations of folkloric themes and structures, with perhaps some personal inventiveness thrown in. That work was distinguished by utter lack of accomplishment. Not very good at all. But I had to work through it.

In the past five or so years, the most singular influence, if you will, has been my daughter’s passionate engagement with photography. It has been influential on my writing, somewhat, but in my life in general it has been, to say the least, spiritually, intellectually, and aesthetically invigorating. Already at sixteen she is a wonderfully idiosyncratic photographer. We have Emma’s work on the wall alongside a Robert Frank, the Cartier-Bresson, and others. It’s nice to look at them everyday.

What are some of your more traditional literary influences? Joseph Conrad pops up more than a couple times, is he an influence?

It would be hubris to suggest any recognizable aspects of my writing that you could see in Joseph Conrad. You can only clumsily recapitulate such genius, in a paragraph or chapter. But truly inimitable work has a timeless autonomy, doesn’t it? The fundamental eccentricity of existence, that’s what I read and re-read and read again in Conrad for. And for the oddness of his cadence, how formal and informal the language simultaneously is. All of his novels, the strongest and less so, none are without absolutely extraordinary incidents, tone, mood, dialogue, fate met with desire, setting. I’m of late reading the collected letters. Again, I have a kind of epistolary obsession. But I read the letters to read the life. Last year, I read all ten volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters. It was immensely satisfying and interesting. It requires of course a certain dedication. I simply admire the psychological and ethical conundrums of Conrad’s characters.

There are other writers I love, too. Max Frisch, the Swiss writer is one of them. Montauk especially, but also Man in the Holocene, Bluebird, and Homo Faber. And I’m a great fan of many twentieth century Japanese writers. Akutagawa. Kawabata. Oe. Kensaburo. Inuoe. They are great writers in my mind. I read them each again every year. What strange beautiful minds.

You mention Conrad’s eccentricity and immediately I think of The Bird Artist and the extraordinary situations you place your characters in in
that novel.

Someone once told me that the thing about talking to people in Newfoundland was that each time they said something, it sounded like they were taking it back immediately. I suppose this person meant a rather surprising combination of aggressiveness and understatement at once. True or not, the opposing forces resident in that kind of speech struck me as a compelling possibility to impose a tension in each and every sentence the characters in The Bird Artist speak. The idea, of course, is to be a kind of stenographer, to try and construct a sense of immediacy, to be the ghost at the kitchen table taking notes. That along with the notion that people are basically capable of saying absolutely anything to one another. I was drawn to how a sentence of dialogue could set up emotional opposites. Friction. Doubt and clarity all resident in the same utterance. A duet of, what, tuba and piccolo, something like that. Cello and—well, almost any other instrument, I suppose. I knew with that novel my obligation was to pare it down, pare it down (I kept looking at Giacommeti sculptures), and, like in a Conrad story, show a kind of situational ethics, how would characters respond under duress? More, Conrad shows how a person can be philosophically quite wild and yet practical at the same time. The daydreaming steamer boat captain, brain-addled with malaria, who at the same time navigates a labyrinthine jungle river brilliantly.

You published The Northern Lights before your first collection of stories, Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad. Did you actually write the novel first? If so, why begin with the novel and not the—arguably—more manageable short story form?

First of all, I’m not a short story writer and I don’t say that in a self-deprecating way, I stand by the stories that I’ve written. But, let’s face it, we’re sitting in the house of one of the finest short story writers around, Stuart Dybek. And you should be able to determine what you write well. I knew when I was writing those stories that they were truncated in some degree, that they were things that I could have tried to extend into longer pieces. But the circumstances of writing them allowed for them, and that’s what it was. And while I stand by them, the cumulative effect of writing those stories was to know that I was not a short story writer.

Don’t misunderstand me, it is a genre which I admire to no end. Stuart and I talk endlessly about Isaac Babel’s stories and about Edna O’Brien’s stories and about Tobias Wolff’s stories, you know, great short stories. And they’re wonderful and fantastic, but it’s not my genre. With The Northern Lights, I thought if I could just get through the writing of the novel, I could then get on to the novel I was supposed to write. But when I got into the story, I thought this is actually working relatively well. And when I finished it I sent it to Peter Matthiessen and he said this interesting thing to me. He said, “It’s not as good as it could be, but if you start it over again, you’ll discover that you’re such a different person that you’re going to have to start it from scratch. So it’s the best you could write, but it’s not as good as it could be.” And that settled quite nicely with me. And the fact that it had some good luck seemed incidental to the actual feeling of finishing a book.

The story “Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad” introduces us to Imogene Linny, who shows up again ten years later in The Museum Guard. In “Milk Train,” you describe the sabotaging of a train, a crime that reappears in The Haunting of L. These minor discoveries were fascinating to me as a reader. I imagine revisiting them as the writer was likewise intriguing. How did these stories navigate time and your imagination to end up in the novels?

Maybe we could start with The Bird Artist, to my mind the most conservative book that I’ve written in terms of its structure, but not in terms of its psychology. It’s got a beginning and a middle and an end. It’s constructed like an opera with sweeping incidents and many minor characters. But because it was so pared down, I felt like I was writing a three-act play if you will, it kept me angry, kept me safe and having a solid relationship with the writing. And that book is a sort of gift that keeps on giving. I mean it did well, it continues to do well, it will be made into a film. And I say all those things with a certain sense of trepidation because for most writers, and I’m certainly one of them, the book you think is your best book may not be the one that has the most balanced components. And that’s just a paradox you live with. It’s curious how that happens. The Bird Artist is a book I like and I’m very grateful to have written it, but it’s not the kind of book I would ever want to write again in its formal sense of balance and structure.

So the deeper, more turbulent psychological temperament that you describe in both “Milk Train” and “Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad” came back full force in the novels. They were unfinished business. Especially with The Haunting of L., the themes in that book were literally haunting to me for years and years. They kept coming back around, coming back around, taking various forms. I started The Haunting of L. before The Museum Guard but had to set it aside. Well, all of this stuff was written in fits and starts. Fits and starts. Abandonment and returns. Until finally they’re the thing at hand and you just work on them. I am envious of writers who can say, “In this two years, I’ll write this book and in this two years I’ll write this book.” I have never had that experience except with The Bird Artist, which I wrote in two summers, six or seven hour days for three and a half months. I doubt I will ever have that experience again. Everything else is just fits and starts. It’s not the way I would like to describe my writing, but it is a fact of life. You know, you have a marriage, you have a child, you have life, you have travels. I still write every day. And it may come around again with another book like that but it certainly has not been a common experience for me.

I had the wonderful experience of teaching The Bird Artist in my advanced fiction writing class here at Western. One of the first things a student said in our discussion was something along the lines of: “Even though I don’t know where Witless Bay is; even though the book takes place so long ago; even though the book describes a world I’ll never know, it still feels like a reflection of my own life.” I share this sentiment with my student, have noted and wondered about this universality in your work as she did, have even come to think of it as the overwhelming thing about it. Will you tell me about how you manage to translate this small, secluded world into something so large?

There’s a bumper sticker that you see quite often that says think globally, act locally, it sounds trite when you repeat it, but actually I find that to resonate quite well in my life as a writer. And if you can fully telescope in on a village or remote place, whether it’s the streets of Chicago or the streets of Newfoundland, there are going to be certain symbolic or metaphorical elements that appear naturally. But to strive for those, to have the ambition to be symbolic would be something I would be loathe to do. That would be beyond my capacity, to write a big symbolic book.

There is a town, Witless Bay in Newfoundland. The basic story of a young man who had talent as a natural history illustrator and murdered the lighthouse keeper was a factual story that I ran into while researching for a film company, a different story altogether. But my attitude with that book was to stop researching. What I started to find out—the facts I started to find out—began to trespass on my imagination. So I like to set books a little bit in the past because it gives me a narrative remove which I’m comfortable with, but also it keeps me from having to impose contemporary psychologies on people. People can act or even describe how they’re acting without analyzing. So that’s why the book was set when it was set. To me, it’s a modern story or it’s not a modern story, but I was comfortable placing it in that time and place. I did not think of universal symbols, only about how to stay close to people who were doing things simply out of passion, out of desire, out of fear, things they could not help doing. I thought the symbolic stuff would take care of itself.

Why that part of the world over and over?

You know, I have to take my time with this. I don’t believe in provenance in fiction. I think wherever you’re born and raised and come from doesn’t mean you can write well about it. The Canadian Maritimes, and especially Nova Scotia, are places that I think are most well met with my particular kind of concentration, they’re melancholy places, they’re places in which the landscape has a huge effect on people. They’re places that have had tragedies, they’re places with older resonances, older cadences, and yet, the ways they enter the modern age are completely compelling.

I said this in a nonfiction book, and I’ll repeat it at the risk of quoting myself: when I wake up in Halifax or Nova Scotia, there is a shorter distance between my unconscious life and my conscious life than anywhere else, I feel more complete and more whole. Why that is, I can’t say. I feel that way in Vermont. I like village life, I like the idiosyncrasies of it, but I think it’s also the landscape—and that term gets tossed around a lot in discussions—but for me it means, as a fiction writer you could develop a landscape the same way you develop a character, you know, give it some sense of immediacy. And so I am partially setting a new novel there, there and England. I’m writing a novella now that is set near a little town called Parsboro in Nova Scotia. It just is endlessly sustaining for me.

Comments about Americans writing about Canada, or Canadians writing about Sri Lanka, or Sri Lankans writing about Hawaii, it’s either good writing or it isn’t. And that’s really how I feel. You know, it’s just a place I’m continually finding stories that become preoccupations and I’m sure that there’s a sameness to it and certain psychological refrains that keep playing themselves out, but I don’t have a desire to move elsewhere with my fiction. The one exception is this San Francisco novella I read last night, but I don’t know what will happen to that. But I can’t wait to get back to the Maritimes in Canada. I like it a lot, I like writing about it a lot.

How often do you go there?

Quite often, quite often. It’s like a second home to me.

Earlier you mentioned the psychological refrain that appears and reappears in your work. There are other motifs and themes in your novels that return over and over. Some of the things that jump out at me are artists and artists’ lives, people living in hotels, letter writing as a narrative strategy, strange names. I wonder if you could discuss some of these motifs.

Maybe it would be useful to start with what I see as a place I got stuck. I’m not suggesting, necessarily, that this is a flaw, but certainly it is a place I needed to consciously leave, and that is the passive hero, the narrator as a passive hero in The Bird Artist, in The Museum Guard, and in The Haunting of L. The irony or paradox is that the telling of a story is not a passive act. So people say these characters are so passive, these men are so passive, they’re so reactive, they come to knowledge about themselves only through adversity and only through indirection, through being affected by the sheer force of personality of other people, usually a strong woman, which is a reality in my life, but doesn’t necessarily mean these books are autobiographical. And I say, well the act of telling something is not a passive act, but it’s obfuscated by the story itself. You don’t say, well that person told a strong story and so he’s not passive, you say he’s vulnerable to strong personalities. And again, it’s psychological vernacular that does and doesn’t apply to fiction.

So, I’m trying now to write a third-person novel. And yet a large part of the novel—it’s called What Is Left the Daughter—is epistolary. When it comes to letter writing, it is true that in each of these novels there are epistolary sections. I mean, look at the age we’re living in: it’s emails, instant messaging, all these kinds of things. Will we look back in a hundred years and say that’s just an extension of an epistolary life? Or will we say it’s the end of the idea of letter writing? I don’t know. But one of my favorite novels is by Natalia Ginsburg, it’s called The City and The House and it’s an epistolary novel of great power, and I think I’m drawn to the idea of writing an epistolary work and maybe all these letters is just a forecast of that.

Letter writing in novels does three things at once: one, it allows for a different style of writing, you can write in a letter a different way, informal to formal. Secondly, it implies distance, you know you send a letter and time has to pass. When letters are sent in The Bird Artist it could take eight, ten, twelve, fifteen weeks, we don’t have that experience now. And thirdly, and I think probably most importantly, it means that a character has to sit down and be thoughtful and report their life either falsely or truthfully, and so you turn a character into a letter-writer and that seems to me to be an interesting moment. And I repeat that, novel after novel.

I guess the larger question is, what can a writer do within his or her own limitations?

I have to ask you about your appreciation for art and artists of all sorts. The theme is an overwhelming presence in your novels, and in the novella that you read from last night.

Yes, and the novel I’m writing now begins in an auction where a woman’s daughter flies in and throws ink on a very valuable drawing. Absolutely, how we define ourselves through art but more how art becomes part of the narrative.

You’re absolutely right this stuff comes around again and again. Art is dangerous, art creates situations, life can imitate art, art can imitate life, all these things in equal measure. And I sometimes start writing a book and there I am saying it’s happening again, it’s about a photograph, it’s about a painting.

Each of your novels introduces a crime or a sin or a cataclysm in the opening scene. In The Bird Artist it’s the murder of Botho August. In The Northern Lights it’s Pelly falling through the ice of a frozen lake. In The Haunting of L. it’s the theme of adultery. Will you tell me how or why this sort of dramatic opening became a distinction of yours? In The Haunting of L. Duvett says, “Maybe if you hear murder that becomes the subject, and that keeps you in your seat.” Are you conscious of keeping us in our seats?

I suppose it could be seen as a kind of paranoia, one that’s sort of umbilically connected to the presiding philosophies of the novels. You know, the day breaks crisp and sunny, the dogs are not fighting with each other, the guy kisses his wife and daughter goodbye, everything is just as it should be, and ten minutes later the ice opens up and swallows the guy. The novel I’m writing now does not have anything falling from the sky, maybe enough has fallen from the sky, but still in the first chapter someone comes out of nowhere and throws ink on a painting. I think it’s the suddenness of those things that somewhere down in my psyche I must be worried about. I wouldn’t know how to really analyze that, but you tap into these things psychologically. I might exhibit them with a little bit less discipline than I should.

It surprises me when I take a step back and think generally about your work that there’s so much violence and sex and madness and murder and sin and addiction, because while all that stuff is happening, there’s something so quiet and understated. Maybe it’s a genre question. I guess The Bird Artist is in many ways a murder mystery.

Absolutely.

Likewise with The Haunting of L. How conscious are you of the distinctions between what is literary and what is genre?

That’s an absolutely excellent and very pertinent question, and the reason is in the ways you’re surprised, I’m surprised. One way I could answer that is to say that all the incidents that happen in these books are representative projections of worst-case scenarios. On the other hand, there’s only one question I would ever want a reader to ask and that is, “What happens next?” And in that way I subscribe, I think, to a Robert Louis Stevenson sense of an adventure story. Not putting people on a raft on the South Seas, but putting people in a certain psychological and emotional momentum and having their fates sort of thrown to the wind. It’s sort of like my favorite Chinese proverb, “If you open enough doors, eventually a tiger will leap out.” I find that to be incredibly accurate to the human condition.

In The Bird Artist when Orkney leaves to hunt birds, his wife, before his boat is out of sight, marches over to the lighthouse to start her affair. On one hand you could see that as a contrivance, that that’s just imposed timing. On the other hand if it illustrates the fact that this woman was so on the verge that she literally could not stand to wait, then you have an entrée into that person’s soul, I think, that action is an index of the sense of urgency, her wanting to begin to find out what her fate is. I don’t happen to live a life like that, but I can fully imagine lives like this and small town, small village life is full of stories like this.

I just got back from Nova Scotia, from a little town called Port Medway, and I talked to a guy there who was a cemetery keeper assigned by the town. We went into a pub and had some coffee. He told me there were a hundred and twenty-six graves and I said, “How long have you been working here?” and he said, “I’ve been in the cemetery maybe thirty, forty years.” I said, “It’s amazing, you know the life stories of everybody in town.” And he threw his head back and spent the next hour rattling off the epitaphs on all of those stones verbatim, like it was a poem. “So and so born in such and such, sacred to the memory of, died at sea, so on and so forth.” And I thought, if you put that in a novel, you’d have to ask readers to suspend their disbelief, but here it was happening right in front of me. A guy reciting the gravestones. All of them. In chronological order as they were lined up. Not in the order of which you would see the graves, but in the order historically in which people died. He had lined up the people in the village. And, you know, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen everywhere. It’s just that I prefer to place those situations in these small villages.

So one is drawn to certain things, one is drawn to certain kinds of stories, one is drawn to certain kinds of psychological reasoning, one is drawn to the atmosphere of small towns. And I think because one is so drawn to those things, certain things will be forgiven. And in my case, I’m afraid that I foresee variations on it, rather than a complete reinvention for myself as a fiction writer. And in turn I can see myself stopping writing fiction when I think enough is enough.

Recently you’ve written two books of nonfiction: My Famous Evening and In Fond Remembrance of Me. In the introduction to the later you write: “Nova Scotia is strange in my life: it provides a sudden noir of the heart, just as it does the deepest calm.” In the former you write: “Nostalgia for a formative period can become an intensifying element in one’s life.” Both of these beautiful sentiments reflect an honesty and humility that are striking for their candor. Why were you compelled to write the two books of nonfiction?

Nonfiction has allowed me to be blunt. It’s allowed me to be unafraid of saying things with a philosophical tonality. And it doesn’t mean that there’s an emotional credibility that should be different from fiction, it’s just that when you’re talking about your own life, when you’re talking about what has precipitated certain patterns of thought and certain patterns of action and certain patterns of behavior, you do it differently—with a different tone—than you would if you were writing fiction.

Take the story of Marlais Quire, which begins My Famous Evening. Someone might say to me, “That sounds like something you made up, a woman leaving a bereaved situation, a violent domestic situation to go off and see Joseph Conrad read,” but the fact is the letters I’ve based her character on are real letters; they’re in the Halifax Historical Archive. That is a nonfiction story that I researched. However, it was a story that I heard before I ever started writing fiction. So what I’m looking back at is a formative kind of story, an influential story, telling me what kinds of fiction I would like to write, but it’s a true story. I just wrote it long after writing the novels. When I was writing that I kept thinking, “My god, I’m looking at how I was influenced.” It was a very strange experience for me. And yet, I think that kind of thing will continue to happen.

Is the sensation upon the completion of a story or book different where nonfiction and fiction are concerned?

Yes.

Why is that, do you think?

There’s a kind of very practical answer and with the nonfiction books, I thought that they were done, that they were what I wanted to write, that they were a little bit sloppy, a little bit of a hodgepodge, a little bit of an anthologizing of experience, but they were done. They were less reliant on an internal structure, and yet the emotional dimension seemed to be complete. They were everything I wanted to include, given the nature of the book.

With the novels, cliché cliché, I never felt that they were completely done. I didn’t feel that they were fraudulent, but I could see where thinking about it a little longer might have helped me to try to make small innovations, recalibrate individual sentences. This will sound like a big leap, but when I look at my fiction, with the exception of The Bird Artist, I see a boy who stutters. My speaking voice, you’ll hear it as you listen to this tape, runs in fits and starts. I will speak eight or ten words pretty quickly, and then there’ll be these long hiatuses, and it will seem like I’m this deeply contemplative person trying to get every word right. But the fact is that deep deep down, I still have a little of the kid who stuttered in the third grade in me. The way I stuttered is that I couldn’t get to the end of a sentence. So I had to imagine and I had to work, work, work, work to construct complete sentences and paragraphs. When I see discontinuities in my writing, I feel it’s still a factor of the discontinuity of my speaking voice. Then there’s hesitations and repetitions, and shifts in my stories. And even in the larger structures, like in The Haunting of L., right in the middle of the book you go back and get a complete story of something and then you go ahead with it. On the one hand, it’s a conscious narrative strategy, on the other hand it can be seen as a discontinuity.

When I finish a novel the flaw of incompleteness on some level is more apparent. With the nonfiction books, I haven’t felt that, I felt fine, they’re done; let them stand for what they are. That’s different from having regret, I wouldn’t change anything in the novels, but I could see where I should have.

You publish with Farrar Straus Giroux, arguably the preeminent literary publishing company in North America, with regularity and success. What do you think about the writer/publisher relationship, or about your relationship with FSG? Do you attribute any of your success to luck?

This is a delicate issue, I think. I want to say in the most direct and honest way how I really feel about it. I want to say that I’m luckier to have them than they are to have me. That is to say, that will sound like a convenient form of self-deprecation. I don’t make Farrar Straus Giroux millions of dollars. I’m at most a mid-list writer as they say. I feel fortunate to have Jonathan Galassi as an editor and to have Farrar Straus as a publisher. It is a great life and a tough business, and there is no getting around the practical side of things.

The deeper terror is that it will all fade and so forth. If you want stop writing, you should stop writing of your own volition. Bottom line, publishing is very pervasive. And so wholly imagined fiction is getting less and less prevalent. Hence, when we have book interviews for radio they want to know what part of this is true? What came out of your own life? Not the kind of questions you’re asking about thinking and writing and so forth, but trying to locate an autobiographical source when you might say, “I made it all up.”

David Mamet was asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” and he said, “I think them up.” Is there room for books that are just thunk up? I don’t think luck plays into it. Perhaps there are certain synchronicities, and not in a mystical way but a sort of practical way. Past that, I think it’s very much a reciprocal relationship. You wouldn’t want to give your editors something that you didn’t think you’d written at the top of your capacity. And at the same time, they will continue to make judgments on your work. I think that it’s the way it’s got to be.

Having said all that, yes I feel fortunate. First and foremost, because I have the wife that I have and a couple of people who I can show my work to, people that I trust. And secondly, when you see so many very, very fine writers struggling, it gives you a deep pause and a chance to appreciate your own success. I would think you’d have to be incredibly determined to undertake this profession now, people like yourself. But it’s not just students of writing. I hesitate to say his, but I’ve been re-reading Conrad’s letters and about five years before he died, he wrote to this erstwhile agent and he said, “I just got the royalty statement. I have fourteen novels and my royalties this year is less than five pounds.” This was the greatest writer of English novels. It wasn’t until the last four or five years of his life that he actually made any money whatsoever. These are heartbreaking letters. And it wasn’t just his personality, although it was partly his own reluctant nature, but it was the times that we always live in as writers. It’s unavoidable. So I think in a way reading those letters is solacing, because if a great writer—you know, when giant’s walked the earth—had to suffer, then how bad can it be now?

Interview by Peter Geye