With Joseph Clark, Bret Easton
Moderated by Alexander Laurence
Three novelists who met up at Bennington
College New York
early this summer and we had a little literary round table. Bret Easton Ellis
is of course the writer of four works of fiction including Less Than Zero, The
Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers. He is at work
presently on a fifth work, which we will probably see in Fall 1998. Jonathan
Lethem is the author of four books including Gun With Occasional Music, Amnesia
Moon, Wall To The Eye Wall To The Sky, and As She Crawled Across The Table.
Joseph Clark is coming out with his first work of fiction in next Spring,
Jungle Wedding, and soon will follow with a novel, Nord Eliot.
Alexander Laurence: It's a muggy
day. It's Friday the 13th. Isn't this a great day to be here at the Bowery Bar?
(laughter)
Joseph Clark: We were thinking
that we should do it on the 12th, and then we thought "What the
hell!" Some people think it's a lucky day.
Jonathan Lethem: It's nothing but
a happy or unhappy coincidence. The fact that we were all there, and with each
person like Joseph who turns up now, who's also publishing out of those years,
it's more and more like a freakish marvel, but I don't know what it is beyond
that.
JC: Did you go there because it
had a reputation?
JL: Not at all. I was admitted as
a painting student. I got there on the strength of my portfolio.
JC: I went there because it had a
reputation for writing, plus it was a John Dewey type of school: no grades. Did
it have that reputation?
Bret Easton
Ellis: Yes it did. But I also went for the very simple reasons as you mentioned
that it had no grades. You got in solely based on your portfolio. It had
nothing to do with your grade point average or your SAT's. That really appealed
a lot to me. I can't figure it out either actually why so many writers
published from that class, from those two years in particular. At other places
like Brown or Yale, or places where a lot of writers go, like Columbia ,
I haven't seen any campus where it was so focused on this one age group, this
one class. I think it's a coincidence. I don't think that Bennington
particularly has a better writing program or more proficient teachers, but for
some reason there was a bunch of really talented writers and really different
writers too.
JL: We were really all there
during the same four-year time span. You can't draw any meaningful line through
all the work.
BEE: The fact that there were so
many types of writers who were going off in different directions, and there
were a lot of empty slots that needed to be filled in a way. So you could say,
the fact that there were so many different types of writers, publishing only
wanted "this kind of book." But I don't know if that is really true.
If people knew that they would doctor it up. I didn't go to Bennington
because I had read about it, in terms of fiction or anything. I also went as
half a music major and half a creative writing major. For me one became more
overwhelming than the other.
JL: That may be part of what
happened, that there was a synergy there, and that was exciting there. It drew
people. I already knew that I wanted to write. I was probably already moving
away from the painting. The energy probably pushed me further into writing.
BEE: I have to tell you at Bennington
that I didn't know that you wanted to be a writer. I read recently in The Voice
that you weren't really turned on by the scene. You were very right about it.
There was a certain type of writing that was trendy and accepted those years
that we were there. It was very minimalist and very Raymond Carver-ish. It was
very pervasive among the students.
JC: I wasn't into it.
JL: It didn't fare that well.
BEE: It's true. Other writing
that came into those workshops got rejected. The timing was wrong for people
who wanted to write a different way. I could imagine people wanting to pull
away from the whole rich people talking in non sequitars with very minimalist
setting, which a lot of writers were doing at the time.
JL: Bennington
was such a small school that if anything predominated, it predominated
completely. There was no room for a second tier of voices.
JC: Do you think that it was the
faculty pushing that sort of style?
BEE: No, I think that it was the
students who were really pushing it.
JL: It's funny that you should
say that because I think it was a combination of the two, but I think the
faculty was ultimately more inflexible. Because I think that some of the
interesting kinds of writing that wasn't welcome there, in fact, our generation
of readers is very open to.
BEE: Yes.
JC: I was reading a lot of Don
Delillo at that time. I remember buying White Noise then, and it blew my mind.
JL: I checked End Zone out at the
library, and it was the first time it had been checked out since the year it
had been published.
BEE: I know people who reading Great
Jones Street and who were then also reading
Cathedral, and they thought the styles were not totally dissimilar. There was a
lot of thing that Delillo was doing that could be applied to minimalist technique
that was really prevalent at the time.
JL: I'm certain that the reading
protocols were more open ultimately. The kinds of writing that could be liked
were more open than what was functioning well in the workshops. There's a
tendency for workshops to close down and become relatively pedantic, even if
they're very intense within that range they are functioning.
BEE: The teachers were also sick
of so much sloppy bad writing, that at least with minimalist writing (laughter)
the stories were very short, the sentences weren't that messed up, because it
was basically "I walk into the cafe and sit down. He orders a bagel. We
share a beer." How could you fuck that up?
JC: But then Jill Eisenstadt
wasn't writing like that.
BEE: No, Jill wasn't. But there
was a little bit. Jill had an element of it there, I think.
JC: I don't remember Donna
Tartt's work then.
BEE: Kind of an element of that
too. There was a certain sort of milieu and a certain of character and a
certain sort of sensibility that was at the forefront there, I think, that were
really about repressed closed people in unhappy relationships and taking a lot
of drugs and getting drunk and spending money. I remember a ton of stories
about that. It was about boyfriends and girlfriends. You know, they would
always end like "I'm sitting alone. It's dawn on commons. I don't know
where to go." These were the stories at the time. Whether it was Donna
Tartt or Jill Eisenstadt or myself, whatever, that was fairly prevalent at the
time.
JL: At some level my radar was
that I had to work the margins there. I benefited from the energy, but
indirectly. I never took a fiction workshop but I sat in sometimes. I didn't
even take independent study. I took a poetry workshop class and swapped
manuscripts with people. Jill and I sat in a room off campus and read to each
other a couple of times. In the summer of 1984 I remember having several long
talks with Bret during the summer workshops. I learned more about Bret's tastes
over that break than I had before.
JC: That was the first time I
heard Bret read.
BEE: I had a workshop and my
teacher was Mary Robison. At the time she was the queen of the minimalists.
There was a time believe it or not when short story collections were really big
and she would get great reviews. Such a book would go through four printings.
She along with Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver is really considered one of the
people who brought to the forefront minimalist writing. Mary was sexy and
young. She was a popular teacher. She got drunk with all the students.
Minimalism became attractive to a lot of people who were there. "I want to
be like Jim Robeson and Mary Robeson, fuck the students, and get drunk every
night." They had really good pot. That was the situation. Minimalism
became attractive for a number of reasons, besides the main one, which I don't
think we touched on, which was a lot of people had gone to the workshops who
were unsure of their talent found that minimalism was the easiest way to write.
If you didn't know what to do, and if you didn't really have a full-fledged
sensibility, it was very easy to mimic minimalism and get away with a story.
BEE: I'm not going to raise my
hand. But I know what you're saying.
JC: I hope that I can get away
with it. My first book is a short story collection.
BEE: The Informers was a short
story collection. The reason is purely--and I hate to be this crass--purely
economical. Because of the way that publishing is set up and because of the way
that the bottom line figures into 98% of what goes on in publishing, short
story collections don't sell as well as novels. I was so shocked when Knopf
published The Informers--which I said this is a book of short stories--they
didn't put short stories anywhere on it and they also didn't put a novel
anywhere on it. I told my editor "This is going to be misleading. People
are going to open this thinking it's a novel and they are going to get lost and
confused when one story jumps to the next." They told me "Listen, we
can't get as many copies of this book into bookstores, no matter who the writer
is, if it says short story collection on it." Which is very depressing.
But still at the same time, a lot of short story collections do come out and
are reviewed. Mary Gaitskill is the prime example of that. It happens.
JL: Knopf was very coy about
that. You can still announce yourself, or create a reputation, with a debut
collection of stories, but the expectation is then that you will raise the ante
by writing an important novel.
JC: Some of those stories in The
Informers I remember reading in a workshop.
BEE: That's true. Most of the
stories were written before 1986. When Rick Moody reviewed The Informers, he
said "When I was hanging out at Bennington, I remember someone had a copy
of this vampire story. What the hell is Bret doing? Does he really need to
fulfill a contact?" Rick, the answer was yes.
JL: I got a similar book of stuff
that was lying around, but I disguised it as a novel, so I got away with it.
It's Amnesia Moon. There's stuff in there that dates before Gun, With
Occasional Music. It took a while to weave it all together, but there was stuff
in there written in '84 or '85.
BEE: Really. Amnesia Moon seems
so thought out in terms of a plot and a narrative, that's hard to imagine it
being separate pieces. You know that Donna Tartt began writing The Secret
History in 1982, and it was published in 1992.
JC: Were any of your stories in
The Informers inspired by Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone? We were reading him
back then.
BEE: My stories? No. Raymond
Carver and Mary Robeson inspired them all.
JL: Some of those stories in The
Informers are a lot funnier than anything Raymond Carver ever wrote. I feel
that's the aspect of Bret's work that people miss. That vampire story is
criminally funny. No one should be allowed to write another vampire story ever
again.
AL: Joseph. Can you tell us a
little about your formation as a writer? You are coming out with a collection
of stories early next year, called Jungle Wedding, published by Norton.
JC: I wanted too much to be a
writer when I was seventeen. Wanted it really badly, very ambitiously, in all
the wrong ways. I was writing, for whatever reasons, to please my parents, to
please the world....
BEE: Terrible reasons by the way.
AL: What sort of writing were you
doing?
JC: I went through a period of
time when I was really influenced by the South Americans, and then the
god-awful thing happened, I made it all the way through Gravity's Rainbow, and
then I read it again. I got completely influenced by that, and was writing
stuff like Pynchon. When I was at Bennington, I think that the early Denis
Johnson, Don Delillo, Stephen Wright, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison influenced
me. I always wanted to be a writer and I was always writing. I wouldn't say I
would call myself a writer till the last year. I took a break from writing
because I don't really think that I had really lived, I wasn't wise enough, I
didn't know enough about myself. I was able to razzle dazzle, and I would get
influenced by the razzle dazzle of Pynchon or whatever, but I realized that I
didn't really have that much to say. I wasn't really fleshing out the
characters very well. I wrote a pretty good novella as my graduating thesis at
Bennington that I'll think that I'll make into a short story. But then I took a
break from writing for six years, until four years ago, when I started writing
this novel, Nord Eliot, which I hope will come out in the next few years.
JL: Another thing about
Bennington besides what was overtly there, there was still a legacy. Bernard
Malamud was still around sometimes.
JC: There was a joke about him
that on a certain day in October, Bernard Malamud took his annual walk across campus.
BEE: And John Gardiner was there.
I never really felt that there was a specific Bennington sensibility about how
you should write.
JL: I wouldn't call it a
sensibility, but I would say that there was echoes of greatness around there if
you wanted to search them out. I actually sat at Malamud's feet for a couple of
little talks and soaked in his aura. And then there was the whole legacy of
Shirley Jackson living at Bennington. Her traces were everywhere there, and if
you had read her stories when you were living there, you realized that she was
a realistic writer.
AL: Did you two, Joseph and
Jonathan, read Less Than Zero when it came out in 1985?
JC: I didn't read it right away.
I read it after I heard Bret read in a workshop. For some reason, I had bought
it and hadn't read it, but after I heard him read I was laughing so hard. I got
all the sardonic, droll, dark humor.
BEE: I was reading a very serious
story about my mother's illness and I remember hearing the heckler in the
audience. Thanks.
JC: Bret and I could talk about
books in common, and we liked some of the same writers. He came from such a
completely different place and background than from where I came from, which is
rural Pennsylvania, that I was fascinated by where he came from. Having talked
to him and other people of a similar background, when I read Less Than Zero, I
realized that this is fiction but it isn't that much of a stretch on anything.
It had a profound impact on me. To see what I thought were perhaps at one time
spoiled and very wealthy kids who had too much money, and to see them as human
beings, it doesn't matter where you come from, you're still a kid. It's still
hell. It doesn't matter if you have a platinum card at twelve or not.
JL: For me frankly it was
complicated that Bret published a book so early. I knew that I was ambitious
and by most measures I was a prodigy. I felt like a prodigy most of my life and
yet here I was just warming up to this process and here was someone right along
side of me had blown off the top of the chart. I was confused by it. It became
part of what I reacted against initially when I backpedaled from Bennington.
BEE: I think that is not an
atypical response. I think that a lot of people had a complicated feelings
toward that book being published while we were all still in school. With the
Less Than Zero thing I think that there was an immense amount of fascination
and a kind of feeling that on one level if someone here can do it maybe it's
opening a gate that we can go through, on the other hand I think that there was
a ton of jealousy and people thinking that this book isn't that good and there
was an undeserved attention focused on it, what was a short and simple almost a
novel about a trendy topic at the time. There was a lot of feelings of
"Why that?" And why not something else.
JC: There's also the thing with
literature majors and the hierarchy of the academies, that maybe it wasn't
literature. And it's still out there. "Well it ain't Faulkner!" Of
course it isn't Faulkner.
BEE: I always get suspicious when
I hear the word "literature." My feelers start going up. Who said
that? Where did that come from?
JL: I always think of confused
used bookstores that have a literature section and a fiction section.
(laughter) There's no order who's in which one.
AL: Let me ask this: What is
appropriate subject for a novel written presently and what is not? Maybe people
reacted to such books as Less Than Zero because they had a prejudice as to
what's literature and what's appropriate subject matter.
BEE: There's no topic that's off
limits for a book. It's really what a writer brings to the material, and how he
investigates it and discusses it and feels it out and works with it. You can
write about anything.
JC: I would have to agree. I
think that the people who are designating things as literature or not are
people who are holding onto the idea of the Modernist voice, and the Modernist
book, and that goes right up to and ends with Carver. The end of late Modernist
writing which I would say Carver would be. I know people who are mimicking when
they write the sound and the look and the feel of literature as they know it.
They have obviously read all the great 20th century American writers. But that
doesn't interest me at all because it has nothing to do with being alive today.
The thing with Less Than Zero and with White Noise and other books, is that's
what it is like. There's the cadence of TV, film, products, advertisements
coming into the narrative. There's so many books written by thirty-year-olds
that are written like they are in the 19th century. There's no cars. There's
nothing, purposely.
BEE: I think less and less. We're
all products of everything that we have assimilated whether it's movies, rock
& roll, fiction, comic books, tons of stuff that we have assimilated that
really comes through some way unconsciously into our writing.
JC: Think about even fifteen
years ago now which we are coming close to being, that was not acceptable, and
not as accepted as it is now.
BEE: I think that no one cares
now basically. I don't think that anyone cares except a coterie of writers
somewhere. I don't think that agents particularly care, publishers care, or
editors care. But it's interesting that it's a concern of yours. It's not
really something that I really think about. I don't think of writing that
consciously in terms of where I'm going to be in terms of this canon.
JL: I think it's hopeless and
paralyzing. If you make a prediction in that context, you're doomed to fail.
You'll be wrong about how it turns out. But as far as my influences, the
organic mulch of influences, they were set so early. The books I read as a
teenager, the films, and the rock & roll.... It always cracks me up that
critics will often receive newly published books as if they were written in ten
minutes as a reaction to a book written six months before. Given the mechanics
of publishing, this is literally impossible. It is so far from the deep
ruminative sources of what I end up writing. If something written echoes with
something else published in the same year, or five years, it is a mere
coincidence.
BEE: I find myself being
influenced by things left and right, not majorly into a way that has completely
changed my temperament, or what I want to write about. I find reading a really
great writer, you can suck it in and it can completely influence you, and you
want it to affect your work somehow. I know that I have come to Delillo a
little late, but I feel that the book that I am working on now is really
totally influenced by him in some way. He's gotten into my system and now I see
things his way. It's hard to write a contemporary novel without thinking of
Delillo.
JL: As She Crawled Across The
Table was heavily influenced by Delillo. It was inevitable. For a while, he
offered, as you say, a set of eyes to see through that seemed compelling than
any other windows. But for me my influences from film are just as vital. If I
go to a Howard Hawks retrospective and absorb fifteen of his narratives in two
weeks, I'm thinking through Howard Hawks' vision of life, or something more
contemporary, all the time. I remember arguing with Bret at Bennington about
obscure Robert Altman films.
BEE: Right. Howard Hawks for you,
Robert Altman for me, in terms of, if I had to choose a director, in terms of
just having someone who enters a milieu and just floats through it and doesn't
really push the hard sell narrative. Basically it's watching people behave. The
impact is accumulative. You see a series or scenes or a series of events, that
aren't that tied together, but kind of wavy and dreamy, and then because of the
accumulation there's some sort of power to it.
JC: Did either of you read David
Foster Wallace's essay about television and fiction writers? It's in his new
book of essays. It's pretty seminal and it's been quoted a lot I've noticed.
AL: Was that the essay that he
attacked Bret and blamed him for a lot of stuff?
BEE: He was hard on me in another
essay I read, not that one. He blamed me for a lot of stuff and at the same
time thrash me. He called me Alice Cooper. (laughter) I still think he's very
very smart. David, you're very very smart. He's a very intelligent guy. He is.
JC: In the essay he talks about
White Noise a lot. He brought up the idea how that in his workshops recently a
voice is creeping into fiction by people in their late twenties or early
thirties. The constant critique by older faculty members, often in their
fifties and even sixties, is that it's too much about watching television and
film. It's a sitcom. The essay is mostly about how the ironic culture of
television is permeating everything. You can't get away from that, whether you
watch TV or not.
BEE: What a revelation! That's so
boring.
JL: I'm a bit allergic to
manifestoes. Novelists are always so much smarter in their novels than they are
in these position papers. He's definitely a lecturer. There’s been a rash of
these defensive passive-aggressive position papers from good novelists.
BEE: Remember when Jonathan
Franzen did it? (laughter)
JL: I wasn't going to name any
names.
BEE: There was a lot of people
who were doing it. That Harper's thing. Well.... I like Jonathan. I think that
he's a very talented writer.
JL: Twenty-Seventh City is a
wonderful novel and he should write another novel.
BEE: But that wasn't a wonderful
essay though. It was so self-congratulatory. It's like something that you think
about but you don't need someone else to type it up and put it in the December
Harper's. It's very obvious. In a way though it's interesting because rarely
does anyone want to write about writers and what's going on in publishing at
this time. It's just not a sexy topic in some ways. You shouldn't complain in
public. Or do it through your fiction. It's always more forceful.
AL: What did you all think of
Brad Morrow's new novel and the article about him in New York magazine?
JL: Haven't read it.
BEE: No desire to read that book.
Everyone told me it was terrible. It was a real shitty book. Someone said
"You got to read the last paragraph." So I went down to The Strand
Bookstore, and picked it up and went "Whoa!" The churchbells were
chiming because someone fell in love. I had a feeling like it was a low-brow
but literary book.
JC: It was
"literature."
BEE: Exactly. It's exactly what
publishing houses want. They want low-brow literature. I think that book fit
the bill. Even with all the publicity about it, I don't think it was that
successful. Boy, was that a depressing article at the same time. Why didn't you
read the article, Jonathan?
JL: I read the article! I can
quote from the article: "There nothing less interesting than the
commodification of literature" said the novelist who permitted this
article to be written about him over a three-year period.
BEE: These articles don't help.
AL: Can a novel compete with
other mediums which basically assault the viewer like film, television, or rock
& roll?
BEE: I think that by it's very
nature the novel can't compete. It's a different kind of assault if a novel is
powerful. All those other mediums makes for a passive experience. Why it can't
as assaulting is because you're holding the book and you're pulling the strings
and deciding when you're going to stop. You're creating everything you see in
your mind. It's your own vision. It can never be that sort of assaulting or
overwhelming experience that a movie can or a rock concert. You're in control
in many ways when you're reading a book.
JC: And I think that you get in
trouble as a writer if you do try to consciously compete.
JL: Yeah. It's a false issue
completely. Novels work there insidious means on you, and it is a
collaboration. The reason that novels can be ultimately more unsettling is
because of the complicity, because you participated. But novels were never in
competition in that same sense. In the history of the novel, there's this only
this one strange moment, this Dickens moment, when they really were, across the
board, a popular entertainment. What novels did was go back to their previous
position which is, not in a class sense, an elite activity in that it is a
chosen self-conscious arena.
AL: Kind of like stamp
collecting.
BEE: Poetry readings.
AL: The novel is not dead. That's
good to hear.
JL: I think that's always such a
silly thing.
JC: It dies every year.
JL: I'm working on a novel that
might be dead but.... (laughter)
AL: Who are some of the other
writers who went to Bennington that we didn't mention? Joseph told me about
Lawrence David who has a few novels out.
BEE: Lawrence David. Yeah. Donna
Tartt. Jill Eisenstadt.
JL: And Nancy Hertzberg
BEE: April Stevens. Angel Engels?
JC: All these people graduated
around the same time in 1985-86.
JL: You know who's having a lot
of success right now who went to school with us? Reginald Shepard.
BEE: Right.
JL: I don't know if you have your
eye on the poetry world at all but he's been in the last three year's Best
Poetry.
JC: He won the Yale younger poets
award. I remember him. I think he also wrote a memoir or a novel recently. Who
was the person you mentioned?
BEE: Mylen Levine. He wrote one
extraordinary novel. He was there then. He was so wasted on drugs the whole
time that he didn't really get his shit together. His manuscripts were always
covered with hair and sauce, and all this crap. You had to wipe it off to get
to them.
JC: He was a wreck. You should
have seen his room at Bennington. Whoo. Fuzzy sandwiches.
BEE: He wrote one book called The
Pacific Revelation. It took place in Venice. He finished it in 1992. I read it.
It blew me away. Very difficult and very long, but with long stretches of being
lucid and funny and readable, and then there was difficult stuff being thrown
in. It was kind of like Pynchon. I sent it everywhere. The silence was
deafening. No one got it. No one understood it. These were all big agents and
editors. Then slowly trickling down, they said "We really like it but we
can't do anything because it's too hard and we can sell only 500 copies." He
wrote another book which is pretty good, then he has this new book which I've
seen and it's the most accessible. I don't know. I hope that it works out for
him. He's really talented.
June 1997
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