Too soon to write about Gary, who exerted such an influence on me for the past decade. Hedi El Kholti, the editor of Semiotext(e), introduced us in the summer of 2016, at Redondo Beach. ‘You’ll get on, you have a similar sense of humour’. He was right, in a way: Gary and I both liked laughing at Gary’s jokes. He held court that day, reading aloud from a biography of Dolly Parton that he had been commissioned to review. I sat at his feet, quite literally.
We had a good time together. For several months we watched movies together over the phone. Dark Victory we watched twice: he loved the way Bette Davis handled cigarettes. One night we walked from the West Side to the East Side, back to his apartment; the last blocks he sang Ingrid Caven’s ‘Shanghai’ from Fox and his Friends. His absence makes the world smaller and more unbearable.
This summer, finding ourselves living in different countries, we began what was meant to be a long interview on his work and life. What we got down appears below, with many gaps and flights across time. Still, it’s nice to hear his voice.
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Could you talk about your intellectual development? What did you read as a boy?
The paper store in my town was the only place that sold paperbacks of books worth reading. I stole a lot of books from there. Mary McCarthy’s novels A Charmed Life and The Groves of Academe, and some essays that were in a volume called The Humanist in the Bathtub – I think these were all collected later in other books – had a strong influence on me in all kinds of ways. I couldn’t tell you why, but the first lines of A Charmed Life, which I couldn’t quote to you accurately now, made a lasting impression on me: I thought, ‘Oh, this is how you do a novel.’ You start with some little piece of your canvas, so to speak, with some memorable but minor incident. Her essays were a great model for essay writing. The ones about Nathalie Sarraute and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and the one on Macbeth – I’ve read these dozens of times over the years. I also got Lolita and Pale Fire at the paper store. Also Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal.
What were your family’s politics? And what was the political climate of the factory-town where you grew up?
My family was utterly ignorant of politics. They voted Republican because that’s how everyone else around them voted. And, I suppose, because they climbed from poverty into the middle class when Eisenhower was president. Never mind that Roosevelt had enabled them to survive the Depression and saw the country through most of the Second World War. That factory world was solidly right-wing, the only newspaper was the Manchester Union Leader, which I finally got to write about when I covered the New Hampshire primaries for the Village Voice in 1992. A seriously fascist newspaper, not only full of lies, but actionable smears – I think they were often sued for defamation and libel. The publisher, William Loeb, spent much of his time dodging subpoenas. What he did to New Hampshire, Rupert Murdoch later did to the whole country, using a more poisonous medium.
How did you come to European literature? Which works became your psychic landmarks?
As soon as I could get hold of novels translated from French or Spanish or Italian, and the Russians, certainly, I gravitated to them much more often than anything written in America. Now I can get by reading French, and these other languages are maybe less mysterious than they were when I was young, but I still can’t read them. Psychic landmarks? Obviously Sartre’s Nausea, and perhaps less obviously, Breton’s Nadja. Both of these books burned themselves into my sensibility. Beckett and Thomas Bernhard sank in later.
What was it in Sartre that seized your imagination? How would you describe his influence on you?
Sartre’s influence is unmeasurable. The first thing that marked this affinity was Sartre’s essay on Tintoretto, ‘The Venetian Pariah’. What attracted me was the fact that I knew almost nothing about Tintoretto and that era in Venice, and I wanted to know more. Tintoretto was probably a shit, but Sartre made you sympathize with him as an underdog. That made an impression. It’s really very simple: Sartre’s was the most intelligent and persuasive voice of his time, which was partly my time, too. He often analyzed things that existed in the world I lived in, he revealed reality to me. From Sartre I learned to look beyond surfaces, learned that nothing is ever what it seems. He also made me a leftist long before I knew what that was. Reading Sartre steered me to Fanon, and to Henri Alleg’s book describing torture by the French forces in Algeria. I was in high school when I somehow came by a book called Torture: Cancer of Democracy. Reading about France and Algeria woke me up to what kind of country I was living in. At that time and probably now, primary and secondary schools in places like Derry transmitted a lot of indoctrination into the American Way. So did television. It wasn’t even explicit, it just permeated everything: this is the greatest country on earth, America is the envy of the world. All that crap was a kind of homeopathic poison.
How did you come to meet European directors – Schroeter, Fassbinder, Kluge?
Sometimes directors I met in New York later gave me parts in films shooting in Europe. I met Chantal Akerman when a magazine sent me to Brussels to interview her. We became good friends, which doesn’t usually happen with interview subjects. We were going to make a film about my folie a à deux with David Wojnarowicz, but I never felt up for asking David to do it. I’m sure he would have, but I didn’t want to, in the end. I met Kluge in New York. Again, I’d gone to interview him, and I wouldn’t say we became friends, but that interview was the best one I ever conducted. And I’ve kept in touch with him over the years. I met Werner Schroeter in Munich in circumstances I described in I Can Give You Anything But Love (2015). I met Christof Schlingenseif in New York. Later he cast me in a film we shot in an abandoned Stasi encampment in what had been East Germany until about two months earlier. I met Fassbinder on the set of a film Peer Raben directed, at Bavaria Studios. I was playing the hermaphrodite slave of the Emperor Nero. Don’t ask.
Can you talk about Schroeter’s role and influence in your life?
Werner and I were sort of platonic lovers for several years – at least more platonic than otherwise. I worshipped him. He changed my way of thinking, of processing reality. His sensibility was very powerful, and he was absolutely the most brilliant person I have ever known. I’m not exactly stupid, but Werner inhabited a much higher realm of perception than I had ever encountered, and it had an enormous influence on my life. I still miss him all the time.
When you arrived in New York in the late 70s, what drew you to the downtown theatre scene? How did you start writing and directing plays?
Bill Rice had a decrepit ground floor apartment with a back garden on East 3rd Street that had access to the basement roof and fire escapes of LaMama Theater on 4th Street. I started spending time with Bill – this was 1978, 1979 – we knew a lot of performers, people who’d worked with John Vaccaro and other underground impresarios, and it occurred to us that we could put on performances of one kind or another in this fortuitous space, using both LaMama’s basement roof and fire escapes as well as the garden, which was basically a large flat dirt-and-cement patch with a few tall, rubbery trees at the edges. Bill was an actor, and of course I was, too. And it fell to me to write something we could perform, so I wrote a very wank play called Red Tide, with a cast of four or five friends of ours. A mash-up of Persona, I Walked with a Zombie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. My entire frame of reference was cinema rather than theatre, so the plays were basically movies, with sometimes very ridiculous scene changes that were film montages, which couldn’t possibly be accomplished smoothly in a theatre set-up. To complicate things further, I decided that we should tape a whole read-through of Red Tide, and have the actors lip-sync to the running tape instead of speaking their lines. But we forgot to put in any cues for exits and entrances, with the result that actors were coming in and going out on the wrong beats and their lines were out of sync. The plays became a more professionally theatrical as we went along – The Roman Polanski Story and Phantoms of Louisiana had lots of set and costume changes, expert lighting and sound design, but were still a bit wank.
Many of your projects – both essays and novels – feature a kind of Svengali relationship or a folie à deux. What attracts you to this dynamic?
I’m fascinated by stories of one person having complete psychic control of another person. Patrick McGrath, whose father ran Broadmoor Hospital, told me that once Myra Hindley and Ian Brady – the notorious couple convicted for murdering several children in Manchester in the 1960s – were cut off from communicating, Hindley became a completely different person: kind, thoughtful, relatable. And then a change in the law allowed Brady to correspond with her. After receiving three letters from him she began echoing his ideas and opinions and went from nice and ordinary to hardened bitch almost overnight. Besides Sartre, Gombrowicz also dealt with this phenomenon, which he called ‘the Interhuman’: how people are formed by the influence of other people, how we become different in our dealings with different people. Oddly enough, I’ve never had to ask myself ‘Who am I’ – I know very well that I’m a decoupage of everyone I’ve met and everything I’ve experienced, perpetually under revision.
The title of your novel Do Everything in the Dark (2003) comes from Swift: ‘Do all in the dark (as clean glasses, etc.) to save your master’s candles.’ Several elements of satire are hallmarks of your novels – the commitment to particularity, the interest in things people would rather ignore.
I feel a strong kinship with Henry Fielding, who derived his understanding of human nature from having been a magistrate in Covent Garden, at a time when it contained one or two of the few theatres allowed to operate in London, and also a huge number of brothels. Fielding’s residence was actually sandwiched between two whorehouses. Many of Fielding’s plays premiered in this red-light district, and it wasn’t uncommon for local prostitutes to act in certain productions – Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, for instance. Fielding understood that the underworld of thieves, pimps, murderers and whores that presented itself in his courtroom operated more honestly than the world of the respectable people who came to see his plays, and that respectable people were in many ways bigger criminals in elaborate social masks and costumes. Fielding expressed this most directly in Jonathan Wild, a novel I’ve read about twenty times.
There’s a Thomas Bernhard story called ‘Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?’ My understanding of satire is comedy with an undercurrent of tragedy. It’s beyond our understanding whether life is a comedy or a tragedy. In my books this is always an open question. I’m a great fan of Molière, Diderot and contemporary writers like Beckett and Bernhard, and filmmakers like Michael Haneke, whose films are hilarious and horrible at the same time. I like things that teeter on the edge of the abyss. I try to emulate that in my writing.
When you embark on a novel, do you start from an idea of a character, or a particular theme, or a story? Do you have a sense in advance of how the novel will end and if you’ll be able to finish it?
A few of my novels had a ready-made element, as in the so-called crime trilogy – Resentment (1997), Three Month Fever (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002) – where I basically took the skeletons of these crime stories and put flesh on them, created secondary characters more or less from scratch, and altered details of the existing story to suit certain themes suggested by the original incidents but not much explored by the news coverage. In every one of those cases there was a rich family pathology that I tried to drill into, to give these stories a larger dimension than what had been reported about them. But with less overdetermined novels I tend to dither, sometimes for years – it takes me forever to find a project that interests me enough to take it on. It always turns into something else as soon as I start writing it. It’s true of essays, too: I wanted to write one about the British television series Harlots, for instance, and I got so mired in reading about the period – 1763, specifically, right after the end of the Seven Years’ War – that I was still researching long after the series finished.
Most of the other novels were invented from the ground up: I had a glimmering of what the story was, what it was about, and then had to make up the characters that would be plausible in the story. Even in Depraved Indifference, which was closely modelled on the story of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes, I made up all the characters, even the protagonist Evangeline.
Could you say something about your novel-in-progress?
I’ve been working on this book for a long time, and it keeps changing – all sorts of formal problems keep presenting themselves. It’s imprudent to talk too much about works-in-progress, you say things and then you feel stuck with what you’ve told people. And if you’ve talked about it, you feel like you’ve already written it, so all the energy drains out of it. For a long time I thought I was describing a sort of microcosm within a contemporary city, but that became a limitation I couldn’t work with. Right now I’m in a magpie mode, taking this and that from everywhere and folding it into my novel.
Read on: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Itinerary of a Thought’, NLR I/58.