In celebration of Deborah Eisenberg’s recent MacArthur Fellowship, we decided to post her conversation with Anna Keesey from our interview anthology, The World Within (for you subscribers, it also appears in Tin House #34). We’ve been calling her a genius for years, and are thrilled that it’s been made official.

After thirty years on West Seventeenth Street in Chelsea, Deborah Eisenberg is moving house. The closets have “disgorged” their contents, books tip sideways on their shelves, boxes lie here and there. Eisenberg and her beloved comrade, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, will be moving to a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks away, a small “palace” of elegant moldings, terraces, a willow tree. Shawn says, in his lovely, wry, and bemused way, “We think it will make our declining years more . . . acceptable.” And the exercise they’ll get apparently makes their doctor “ecstatic.” It’s no accident that some people in sixth-floor walk-ups are ninety years old and going strong.

But even for the casual visitor, such a move seems laden with loss. This apartment, with its air of industrial romance, clarity, and ghostly chic, seems right for Eisenberg’s literary aesthetic: radiant, complex, dense, fierce, and comic. In a closet-sized study here, she has composed some of the most ambitious and memorable works of fiction in the contemporary literary landscape. Like her peers Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, she has predominantly written short stories, and what short stories they are: “Flotsam,” “A Lesson in Traveling Light,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “In the Station,” “Someone to Talk To,” “The Custodian,” “Mermaids,” “Revenge of the Dinosaurs.” For them, Eisenberg has received numerous awards: Best American Short Story and O. Henry prizes, a Whiting award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious Rea Award for Short Story, made to writers who have contributed substantially to the short story form. Her prose is fresh and lyrical and pungent; by any accounting she’s one of the country’s most distinctive stylists, and her capacity to describe fleeting states of mind and heart is unmatched. All her work shows a species of stubborn courage in dissecting the mind, with particular attention to the space where consciousness and conscience overlap. She resists the blandishments of conventional wisdom, particularly those of her own cultured kind; like a diplomat on an eerie planet, she has beautiful manners but takes no creature’s self-presentation as the truth.

Her characters—generally some variation on that class that used to be known as “middle”—are struggling to stay on their moral feet in an America—or an American satellite—that is slippery with hypocrisy, pain, deception, and exploitation. To their confusion and chagrin, the characters often find that they themselves are implicated in the production of the grease beneath their feet. Eisenberg says, “I’ve always been interested in power relations,” which is, perhaps, not unusual for a writer, but the fictional permutations of that interest are so diverse and subtle that their main commonalities may be the sensations they provoke in the reader: venous dilation, prickling, unease, and ferocious enjoyment. In “Windows,” a woman leaves a man who has beaten her, taking with her his child; it’s a decision that’s not really a decision, but a deep, unconscious impulse, and it dooms woman and child to permanent flight and pursuit. In “Tlaloc’s Paradise,” the arrival on her Mexican doorstep of an inquisitive young tourist causes an expatriate American woman to recall with pain the Communist hunting that sent her south decades before. In “Some Other Better Otto,” curmudgeonly New Yorker is nearly crippled by grief for his schizophrenic sister. In “Twilight of the Superheroes,” upwardly mobile millennial youths, contemplating the pleasures of their future from the terrace of a fabulous Manhattan sublet, are presented, one beautiful morning, with the sight of dark figures sprinkling from the destroyed World Trade Center.

Power relations, indeed, but not paraded in front of us with academic righteousness; the subject of interpersonal, intersocial relations is subsumed in Eisenberg’s characteristic and inimitable rendering of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. Her sinuous use of point of view displays—without shrinking—the layered, elusive nature of thoughts and the illusory quality of what we may believe are convictions.

Eisenberg, now sixty-one, is strikingly beautiful in a way that probably didn’t go over big in fifties Winnetka; large-eyed, slight, and leggy in tall boots, she resembles a black swan, a Jazz-Age divorcée, or a European ballet mistress with a haunted past. When we had our conversation in the quiet of the disassembled apartment, she shared my terror of the recording device, and it took a couple minutes to arrange ourselves in a sufficiently oblique relationship to it.

—Anna Keesey

Anna Keesey: It’s one of my missions in life to get more people to read your stories. They’re amazing.
Deborah Eisenberg: Thank you. But it could be an uphill battle.
AK: I mean, a lot of people do read them, but they tend to be the smartest and most well-read people I know. I wonder why the next tier of smart and well-read people don’t read them?
DE: I gather that there is something kind of intimidating, or, not intimidating, but inhospitable about the stories. I mean, I don’t see it, but I know sometimes they’re greeted with impatience: “Why does this have to be so complicated, why can’t you just say it immediately, why do I have to find my way around in the scene?” Well, I never think of myself as presenting obstacles—it’s not a game, in my view. I’m not making a game of some sort.
AK: You’re not purposefully withholding information, to get an advantage . . .
DE: Never. I don’t withhold information to achieve an effect. In fact, I don’t withhold information at all. I don’t hide information that the characters know. I’m trying to be faithful to experience, or sensation. But I think there are readers who are confused by having information come to them in the way it does in my stories—it’s not parceled out in tidy, discrete bits.
I remember asking my friend Craig Lucas, the playwright, to read a story. I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember that I considered it finished, and it was pretty much what I’d wanted it to be, but I was sending it around and it was being greeted with what I’d call complete incomprehension. Naturally, I wanted to figure out what the problem was, so I enlisted a few people, including Craig, who I consider to be very good readers, without really telling them why. Anyhow, Craig didn’t seem to have any trouble with the story at all, and I asked him why he thought other people might find it so baffling, and he said, “Well, you have to be awake when you read it . . .”
It wouldn’t seem to be much to ask of a reader, but actually, it turns out that a lot of people like—and expect to be able—to read fiction while they’re half asleep. And it’s just not possible to do that with my stories. You might not realize what something is doing in one of the stories, but there isn’t anything in them—in my opinion, of course—that isn’t doing something; I don’t just chuck in idle stuff for the fun of it. And if you miss detail, it will be at a cost to your understanding or enjoyment of a story. Things are placed at angles, and unless you’re receptive to the way a given story is coming toward you, to the way you’re moving through the story, you’re going to miss a lot, and then you’ll be confused, frustrated, and angry.
I think that some people have to slow down quite a lot to read the stories. I’m such a slow reader that it’s a natural pace for me to have to move slowly through a piece of fiction.
AK: Well, the fact is you’re writing short stories, but they are the longest, most complex short stories that anybody is writing. I imagine that even Alice Munro is sitting in her kitchen in Ontario, drinking Nescafé or something, thinking, Wow, this is so fucking complex! I just don’t know if I can follow it! You have these webs of characters, who have all sorts of different, and sometimes obscure, relationships to one another, and each brings in an overt agenda, and a covert agenda, and an unconscious agenda; then, often, they are getting drunk, or getting high, so their perceptions are changing dynamically over the course of the story, and beyond that, we have another level, which is that they’re not just talking about their boyfriends, they’re talking about American privilege, or race, or McCarthyism. Well, they’re sort of talking about those things, and sort of talking about what’s right in front of them. You can see that if the reader’s brain is not firing on all cylinders, he’s not going to get it.
DE: Absolutely. And then the whole story just seems like static, or papier-mâché or something.
AK: Where does that come from? You talk about being a slow reader, or a literal reader, someone who as a child had trouble learning in a conventional way, and I wonder if this deep level of detail—this capacity to stay in a given moment that doesn’t resolve immediately or easily—is an aspect of the way you think? Is it a neurological personality, or is it an aesthetic commitment: this is the way the world needs to be represented, and other ways are fake?
DE: I’m guessing it’s an aesthetic commitment based on a neurological fingerprint. Condition, actually, is the word I think of, but in its broadest sense, not as pathology. It’s very much the way I experience the world—not very streamlined—and therefore feel appropriate and necessary—natural—for me to represent it that way.
AK: People are so used to seeing experience predigested for them, and they expect to see those markers, and when they don’t see any of those—what they’re seeing is an original story—they throw up their reader hands.
DE: Yes, and I’m always perplexed when a reader is perplexed, when a reader says of one of my stories, “What was that?” I think, Well, it’s what I said it was. It’s the thing I said.
AK: One of the things I notice is that the point-of-view characters seem always to have information, perceptual data, flooding over them. They aren’t armored. Their capacity to predigest information, to strong-arm the data away from them, to filter or ignore it, is—
DE: Is compromised.
AK: But they are often the characters who can then pay attention to what people . . .
DE: Actually say and do.
AK: Yes. So when you’re writing a story, and you are rendering that experience—when light and sound are behaving in strange ways, when the character is overwhelmed by sensory perception—are you recalling it, or are you inventing it?
DE: It doesn’t feel like recalling. But it can’t be inventing—I mean, what would you invent a sensory perception out of? So it kind of has to be some sort of mental act related to recall. I mean, there’s the vaguely odd paradox in my life that I can’t actually pay attention to anything, or I don’t seem to be able to pay direct attention, but things do apparently slide in somehow and live vividly in some area that’s usually unavailable to me . . . There’s a news broadcast, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, that I love to listen to in the morning, it’s indispensable, but usually after it’s over I have to ask Wally what the news was!
But if Wally’s not around, I still seem to end up—often much later, and very mysteriously—with a lot of the information, somehow, even though my brain seems to have been just an impermeable obstacle while I was listening. I miss stuff—I’m really like Mr. Magoo, of all the senses. The elephants are walking by, and I don’t notice.
AK: But you’re noticing that the light looks like apple cider.
DE: I don’t notice the elephants, but I do register, say, out of the corner of my mind, some toenails and trunks and fuzz on great big ears. I think something like, Huh, yeah, toenails, trunk, ear fuzz. What seems to be going on in my brain is nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I have no memory at all, which can be kind of alarming. That is, the years have stacked up—I must have had some sort of experience at some point in all that time! But when I’m trying to picture what the light was like in a room at a certain time of day, well, I sort of can picture it—so I’d assume that something of the sort was taken in by my brain at some point, because something like that, a sensory experience, is, I would suppose, uninventable.
Fiction is making stuff up, but I would suppose that it’s making stuff up by analogy. If you’ve never been beaten up but you need to describe what it’s like to be beaten up, you probably won’t have more than the routine difficulties involved in describing something that you have experienced directly. Because you’re almost sure to have some experience in your sensory repertoire, some feeling of being physically violated and shamed—maybe it was tripping over your ice skates when you were a kid—but the knowledge of the experience common to both getting beaten up and tripping over your skates is somewhere in your body.
AK: It also strikes me that you can tell when you move from something that is an authentic analogy into something that is phony or invented or a cliché or somehow received or self-serving—a lot of writers who are good don’t catch themselves there, they aren’t as vigilant. Do you just never go to phony places?
DE: I always go to phony places. For a long time when I’m working on something, I can’t look at what my hand has produced the day or week or month before, because it’s just hideously phony. You’d think that phoniness would be something that’s achieved with work—that the natural would precede the artificial—but it’s actually the opposite for most writers, I think. There are famous exceptions, of course. But generally, unphoniness is what you achieve with work. The first impulse is always a cliché, or something that’s inaccurate. It’s a kind of inaccuracy that is the most powerful siren song, because although it’s very difficult even to approximate something, it is actually possible. And you’re so proud of yourself for having approximated it, you think, Well, that’s pretty good—
AK: That’ll pass.
DE: That’ll pass. I’ve so often had the experience with a gifted student, when I say, “You know, that doesn’t ring true,” and the student says, “I know, I knew it, I knew it.” And they didn’t quite let themselves face it, because it’s so hard. It’s a bit of a habit, a discipline, which I acquired under the tutelage of the wonderful man I live with, who would just never let anything pass—and I feel that the reason it’s hard to acquire is that you’re terrified that you’re never going to be able to get it, really; you’re going to be able to get pretty close, but not close enough—it’s just not going to be adequate no matter how hard you work, and so you allow yourself to think, This will do.
But if you can build up the confidence or patience—simply patience—or steady nerves, you think, Well, I didn’t do it today, and I’m probably not going to be able to do it tomorrow either, but I will be able to do it sooner or later, then you can just relax. I think one of the reasons I’m so slow is because I’m so mortified by all the horrible writing that I do, and instead of just thinking, Okay, I’ll let it be for now and go crashing forward and I’ll get it to work eventually, I lose heart, because I don’t really have the confidence that I will be able to get it to work. You see people who write swiftly and also extremely well. It’s pretty thrilling—you can just tell that they’ve got that kind of nerve.
AK: So you can’t go crashing forward, but you return eventually to the scene of the crime; you linger and start figuring it out again.
DE: Well, unfortunately, I don’t know what something is until I’ve already figured it out! So maybe I’ll always have to work backward like that. I do think that the caliber of a piece of fiction is pretty much proportional to the fiction’s urgency and seriousness of purpose—even if it’s something funny, of course, or apparently light as a feather—and I usually can’t locate the purpose of what I’m doing until I’ve already spent a very long time on it. People say to writers, “How do you find the right word? You’re good at finding the right word, how do you do that?” Well, that is really not the problem. The problem is to think of the thing—what it is that the word needs to represent—and then the word will eventually be there.
AK: So you must believe, then, that eventually all things you experience can be described in words.
DE: I do. I don’t necessarily have all that much evidence in support of this belief, but I do believe it. Although, I would say that over the course of the effort the returns can be substantial in their diminishment. I fervently wish I were a composer or painter or something so that I would be able to render a lot more expeditiously the incredibly ephemeral effects I yearn to render. Writing really feels like you’re down in the quarries with your axe. I grew up with H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of “Death in Venice,” which is no doubt wildly inaccurate and wildly flawed, but at the end of the story there’s a description of Aschenbach thinking about writing, that’s translated as, if I’m remembering it correctly, “to liberate from the marble mass of language the slender forms of his art.” Well, I don’t know how much of that is really Mann and how much is Porter—or, at this point, come to think of it, how much is me—but it’s just so accurate! You think of the duomo in Siena, those thin, ethereal marble forms. The thing that wants to be written really does seem to be hidden in the marble mass, and you think—
AK: You think, How is that done? How do you do it without breaking it? How do you know it’s in there?
DE: Yes. And you think, Argh—if I were a composer, or a painter, I could do this in twenty seconds!
AK: And what do the composers and painters of your acquaintance think of that?
DE: Well, I haven’t actually run the theory by them.
AK: Back to the idea of choosing the right word, which we agree is not really the problem, it seems to me that one of the great pleasures of your stories is the outrageous richness of the diction. In “Rafe’s Coat,” for example, there’s line in which “Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous baying.” I think, Ratify? Raucous? Bay?
DE: I was pleased with that. It seems correct and efficient to me.
AK: There’s a lot of the language of unpleasant physical qualities: things are “gummy,” “bulbous,” “oozing.” And then we have all those Latinate words: witticism, lambent, ratify. So there’s a rich range of diction. And I thought, Well, when did she gather those words? Did she get that from being attached to Wallace Shawn by a string for years?
DE: Well, I was a big reader as a child. As a child, up until about when I was fifteen. And I was very a big talker, when I finally did learn to talk. I was a very late talker. But when I did finally start, evidently I talked in whole paragraphs and plenty of them. I remember being shushed a lot. But apparently I wasn’t about to talk until I could use relative clauses.
AK: You have an older brother. He might have colonized the language thing.
DE: He was much older. Now he’s not, but he was then—six and a half years. And always very articulate. And my mother, I believe, was very exact as well. I myself talked in volume but not necessarily well. I still feel pretty helpless when I try to express the simplest thought without a piece of paper in front of me and a lot of time. But I loved language-y things when I was little. I loved “Pogo,” for example, long before I was old enough to understand it. I mean I loved “Pogo.” It’s always a source of fascination for both me and Wally—on what basis are children enjoying these things they can’t possibly understand?
AK: There’s something about the physical profile of the words on the page that is intriguing. It seems to me that there are some people who have a kind of mind for whom the word, the signifier, doesn’t turn immediately into the signified. They don’t drop instantly through the hieroglyphic into the imagined thing, but rest on the surface of the word for a while. A lot of those people turn out to be poets, of course.
DE: That’s so interesting. That sort of abstraction, which you think has nothing to do with the content, with no value of its own, actually does represent the content in some way. So [gesturing to teapot on table] you think TEEEAAAAPPOTTT. Hmm, what are we saying?
AK: Certain things hit you at a certain age, when you’re developing certain skills cognitively . . .
DE: We both should have been brain scientists. It’s a shame.
AK: So you were a huge reader, and you were gathering these language trinkets that you were not yet deploying. But you were not very compatible with school, not able to remember what you were taught . . . what was that like?
DE: Well, I don’t know. It’s still the same, though. Now, this is an unpleasant story and I can’t remember it very well, but we were having dinner with some people the other evening, some of whom we didn’t know, and there was one guy of whom I kept thinking, Boy, is this guy dumb, he doesn’t understand a single word anybody is saying, it’s unusual to run into somebody this dumb, isn’t it remarkable. And then about ten minutes later I realized that I had no idea what people were saying.
AK: It was you! You were the dumb one!
DE: Well, I think it was both of us, maybe. It was really shocking. I was sitting there and nodding, but I couldn’t understand a single word. Everyone might as well have been saying, “Arf, arf, woof, woof.” It happens to me a lot, I’m sorry to say.
AK: I remember you saying once that you started writing because you had to figure out something to do.
DE: Yes—well, at some point during the years when I was just managing to entrench myself in writing, I heard a young woman, much younger than I was, talking about going to a writing program. She said, “Oh, yeah, I thought maybe I’d try that.” Well, I almost went through the ceiling, because to me writing wasn’t something you’d casually try. It was as if someone had said, “Yeah, stigmata? I Think I’ll give that a whirl.”
I wasn’t thinking of suffering, but I was thinking of exaltation. Writing fiction does seem to me like going on a vision quest, and not something to be taken up lightly in any way. And for me, starting to try, or trying to start to start to try, was a court of last resort. I mean, my life—you see that brick wall [pointing out the window]? Well, that brick wall was here [hand in front of face.] It was upon me. It was kind of a desperate situation. Those are the circumstances in which I started to write.
And of course I couldn’t do it at all. And if I hadn’t been living with a writer, I would have thought, Oh, that’s because I can’t write. I’m not a writer. I have friends of course who are writers who were just born being able to do it, or were able to learn rapidly when the time came. But because I started so late and was so inept, my embryological struggles with writing are still very present in my mind, so I have a lot of sympathy for young writers, particularly those with an acute sense of the difficulty of it. And had I not been living with a writer I would have thought, Well, this is ridiculous, of course I can’t do it. But he was able to inform me that the fact that I was bad at it, that I couldn’t just sit down and toss off a reasonable sentence, let alone a trilogy, bore no relation to whether I was suited to it. And that is precious, precious knowledge. A lot of people don’t—well, how would they know unless they found out from other writers?
AK: Yes—the hothouse. So, did you start writing with the play Pastorale?
DE: No, I started with the story in my first collection called “Days,” which concerns someone quitting a heavy, long-term smoking habit. It’s the only autobiographical thing I’ve ever written, and it is autobiographical because I didn’t think I was writing fiction. I thought I was keeping a journal about going to this wonderful, kind of scruffy gym in a neighborhood YMCA. This was long, long before people considered it, as so many now do, de rigueur to go to a gym—it was pretty novel, in fact. And it was all I could do at that particular point in my life to get out of bed once every month or two and go to the Y with my friend Kathy, so I thought, Here’s this wonderful institution which is going to save my life, and if in fact I am going to try to write some tiny thing, I’ll write about what it’s like to go there.
And I was completely unequal to the task. Wally was encouraging me, but my threshold for frustration was low, very low—I kept tearing up what I’d written. After a very long time—I’m guessing about a year and a half, I gave what I’d done to Wally, and I was very excited about having filled up some pages, but very uncertain about what I’d filled them up with. And Wally said, “Well, you haven’t written a factual piece about the Y, you’re writing fiction, so now turn it into fiction.” So I was in a state of intense frustration and anguish, and I spent another year or so turning it into fiction. And I gave it to him, and he said, “Great, you’ve turned it into fiction, but it’s lost its life. Do it again.” And I thought, Well, which of us am I going to kill? But I wrote it again, and he said, “Wonderful—you’ve written a story!” It took about three years, altogether.
AK: I have a question about that story. The character comes to understand, and says, that the point of life is to have a good time, to find out what one wants to do, and start doing it. In the context of the story we understand how it’s a revelation to her, because she has told us that previously, whenever she had a feeling, or something to say, she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and inhaled smoke instead of speaking. So it seems as if she has, actually, no self. Did that experience characterize you? Was it an exaggeration of something you experienced?
DE: Far from being an exaggeration, it was an understatement—to the most remarkable degree, you would hardly believe it. There was this little prisoner waiting inside a shroud of smoke, inside the personality that had been able to survive with the aid of that smoke—a very angry, starved little creature—so when the façade crumbled because I stopped smoking, the creature stepped forth, without a shell, without skin, totally unformulated, and was just this volcanic, lavalike, terrifying, inchoate, dangerous, endangered thing.
AK: How old were you?
DE: I was thirty. I’d been smoking since I was fifteen. By that time I was a very heavy smoker, and I loved it, I loved every cigarette I ever had in my life. I can practically remember their names. Stopping was like a death. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop by exercising my willpower, so I made it non-negotiable.
AK: How did you do that?
DE: I decided that I would never, ever, do it again. Never, ever. No, worse—there was no “never again” to contemplate; the future was closed as far as smoking and I were concerned. Because I knew that if I had to rely on willpower to stop smoking, I would lose. I went to a hypnotist, who taught me how to hypnotize myself, but there was something about the physical sensation that I couldn’t stand. I just couldn’t bear it, so instead of using that technique or using my nonexistent willpower, I just put smoking behind me.
AK: So all you had to do was suffer, not decide.
DE: Yes. It was horrible. I was in mourning—not only for the fantastic consolation of nicotine but also I suppose for the person, the smoker, I had just killed, as well as the person inside the smoker whom I had allowed to be stillborn long before. And here was this new person, entirely unequipped. Probably if someone who had known me in kindergarten saw me now, he’d say, “You’re exactly the same.” And in many fundamental ways I’m sure I am. But in some critical ways I’m very different. Or maybe I’m substantially the same as I was in kindergarten, but very different from the way I was at sixteen.
AK: It was a challenge to know yourself, to act on your own behalf, that sort of thing?
DE: I’d say maybe acting on my own behalf. Authenticity of experience was never the problem. Autonomy was. It was an incredible problem. A lot my experiences were fairly bitter, because I was so reduced, so reduced and rather damaged. Have you ever seen or read the play Kaspar by Peter Handke? Well, I don’t remember it much, so I’m talking about something I don’t really remember, but it’s about Kaspar Hauser, who was a feral child. It’s very beautiful. Handke has a lot of views that I consider pretty loopy, or anyhow, I don’t agree with them, but what a writer! I mean, that guy is fabulous. So, there’s a phrase that might be reiterated for half an hour, or maybe it just occurs a few times, but Kaspar says, in the translation I encountered, anyhow, “I want to be someone like somebody else was once.” Or maybe it’s “I want to be a person like somebody else was once.” I never really felt like a human being. But just now I’m embarked on this huge apartment move, and the other day I was calling Con-Ed to change the account, and calling the movers, and I thought, Wait a minute, I am someone like somebody else was once. When did that happen? Because I sure wasn’t always someone like somebody else was once.
AK: You turned into a person who could make phone calls. I’ve probably told you this story before, about when we were all at Iowa and Denis Johnson was there briefly. At the Mill one night he talked about how grateful he was to have married his wife, and we said, “Why is she great?” and he said, “She can talk to those people.” We said, “What people?” and he said, “Those people who call on the phone about the mortgage. I can just say to them, ‘You’re not human,’ and hand the phone to her.”
DE: I think he’s the funniest person alive. I’m sure I’ve told you that I used to follow him around at Iowa?
AK: Just to hear what he said?
DE: Just to—that luster, to travel in its wake or something. I’d see him at the grocery store and say, “Denis, Denis, hey, hi, Denis, can I carry your beer, Denis?” Well, I’m sure it wasn’t beer because he wasn’t drinking, but potatoes or whatever. And you know he didn’t have a clue who I was, I think, that he and I were teaching in the same program—I was just some weirdo following him around the grocery store.
AK: Let’s see. You wrote “Days” and then what came next?
DE: What happened next was that my friend who appears in that story as Kathy—her name is Kathy, and she’s a writer and director, Kathleen Tolan—said she wanted to direct a reading of that story at the Public Theatre. And I said, “No, no, it belongs on the page, blah blah,” and she said, “Well, what kind of a friend are you?” So I said okay, and she got a wonderful actress, Karen Ludwig, to do the reading. So a little later Joe Papp, who had initiated the Public and ran it, called me up and said, “I’d like you to write a play.” And I said, “Well, Joe, I can’t write a play.” And he said, “Well, I’ll pay you.” I said, “Oh, that changes things considerably.”
But I had a very good waitressing job at the time—I mean, good in that nobody had bothered to fire me, and believe me, no one else would have hired me, so I was very reluctant to give it up. And Joe said, “Drop a couple of nights a week, and I’ll pay you, and you’ll write.” I was totally panicked. He said, “You’ll come in and show me what you’re writing.” And I said, “Oh sure, of course,” but I never show anybody what I’m writing and I wasn’t about to then, and of course, actually, for a long time there was nothing. Wally basically moved out so I could just be a lunatic, doing it.
AK: He’s the best man in the world.
DE: He’s the best man in the world. So after five months, bonk, there was this play.
AK: But it can’t be true that bonk, there was this play. Was there . . . fragmentary chaos that suddenly resolved into a play? All those funny characters, who are turning coffee cups upside down over dead mice and dropping acid accidentally—
DE: There’s a large autobiographical component to that one, too. Actually, I sort of tried to write something as a story that then became that play and partly a different story—very different—later. And, really, it was remarkably bonk. I’ve never written anything so fast. Except for “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” which I wrote very, very quickly, for me, that is, over a few months. But with that story I had real clarity of purpose from the outset.
So I gave this play to Wally and he said, “Gosh! Gee! Great, a play—but I don’t get it.” And I said, “Believe me, this is really good.” I don’t know why I had such confidence in it, but I did—complete, serene confidence. I said, “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands, it works, it’s good.” So then I brought it to Joe, and Joe said, “I hate this play.” And I said, “But, Joe, it’s really good!”
And Joe loved to be the guy dishing out favors, so he was infuriated at having to be the bad guy. It drove him sort of wild, so with every second that passed while I sat in his office with him, he became more and more vehement about how much he hated that play. But I didn’t mind at all. I just found it hilarious, for some reason. So Wally said, “Why don’t you invite the people you work with at the bar to read it.” We got a bunch of food and everyone came over, and afterward Wall said, “I see. I see.”
AK: He got it.
DE: Yes, because it did work, after all. And by the time I’d written the play, I’d begun to think, This is great. This is really fun. That feeling you can’t get from anything but making art. And I’m very grateful to Joe, because if he hadn’t encouraged me—of course as it turned out, he was trying to discourage me, but it was too late by then—I very much doubt I would have kept on.
AK: Making the thing that no one else has written before, because no one else could, because only you can.
DE: Yes. And that’s every writer’s birthright.
AK: I suddenly had a vision of a writer taking her hand off and putting it on the street for everyone to look at. It’s that disturbing, that real, and that much ours.
DE: Yes, that’s absolutely right.
AK: But after having the pleasure of that reading of the play, you went back to writing stories. You were living with a playwright, and you were around actors and directors and playwrights a lot, and you’d had that communal experience, and yet you went back to the more solitary world of writing stories.
DE: Yes. You might well wonder why, because of course theater is so much more fun, a million times more fun. But for one thing, I don’t have the nerve for plays. It really takes steady nerve. You can’t imagine the terror of production—all the things that can go wrong with people that just won’t go wrong with a pencil and eraser; your pencil won’t get sick, for example, or be cast in a movie during rehearsals. It’s exhilarating, but you have to be strong. Also, I don’t think that the form is that compatible with the way I tend to look at things. What I do is a little fragile for theater. I like to control things much more than you can control a play.
AK: I would say that in a play you can’t render consciousness, the elusive quality of consciousness, in the same way.
DE: That’s it, that’s exactly right. You really can’t do that so well in theater, though of course there are many things you can do that you can’t do in fiction.
AK: Was it produced fairly soon after?
DE: No, it sort of floated around. I sort of forgot about it. As far as I was concerned, I’d had the fun, though it turned out there was so much more fun to be had. Carole Rothman, who I knew a little bit, called me up and said, “I’d like to direct your play,” and I said, “Great! Just don’t change anything.” And she said, “Well, er—don’t be ridiculous, plays are always changed.” I said, “Not mine.” But I did end up changing it a little bit.
AK: What was it like to see it?
DE: Rehearsals were the most fun I ever had in my life. In fact Christine Estabrook, who played Rachel, said, “You’ve just got to stop laughing! You’re disrupting rehearsals!”
AK: “We can’t have a maniac in the house.”
DE: Yes. I mean I couldn’t believe what they were doing. I couldn’t believe what they were doing. They were so funny. I was screaming. Because the writer can’t imagine anything as concretely as the person who is going to get up on stage—it’s going to be their voice, their body, their rhythms of speech, of breathing, of moving—the particular quality of their concentration.
It was amazing. But I don’t enjoy sitting in the audience. I really hate it. Just having other people experience your work. Just to be sitting there noting how other people are responding—you don’t have to watch people reading your book!
AK: And you’re so close to other people, when you’re in a theater. So, I’m interested in what order the stories were written in. I think it might be of interest to posterity—
DE: I’m glad you put it that way.
AK: —and so what came after “Days”?
DE: “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris” was the second. That’s a story I’m pleased with. Now I see lots of things that are clumsy about it, but I’m still pleased with it.
AK: Is that common? When you look back, are the stories meaningful? Do you remember their composition?
DE: These days I almost never look back. I did at first, but not now. And I remember very, very little about making each story, though I do remember certain things about certain stories.
But early on, there was no pressure on me at all—I had all the time in the world. “A Lesson in Traveling Light” was my third story. The fourth one, which I don’t like, was “Rafe’s Coat.” But it was the one that got my first book published. I was Laurie Colwin’s waitress, and she kept asking me what I did, and I kept telling her I was a waitress, which was absolutely true, but then there was a review of my play in the Times, which, incidentally, compared my writing to hers. So Laurie, who was a wonderfully generous and lively person, demanded to see something I’d written, and I had just finished “Rafe’s Coat,” so I gave it to her, and she passed it on to her editor, Alice Quinn, who liked it, and offered to publish a collection when the time came. But in fact, I had no interest in making a collection then. I was amazed that I could even produce a piece of paper with a mark on it.
AK: But “Rafe’s Coat” does have some of the funniest things in the world in it. Doesn’t Heather, the soap opera actress, describe something or someone as being like “a stack of fish on a plate” or “fish on a plate”? And it does have Cookie ratifying things with raucous baying. What don’t you like about it?
DE: First of all, that quality of consciousness that you mentioned. The story’s more superficial. I mean, it doesn’t attempt not to be superficial, it is the way it was supposed to be—
AK: It’s about manners, and so on—
DE: It’s sort of brittle. The narrator is obviously a very self-deceptive person, and that was the fun of it, keeping up that big edifice, while also making it transparent. It was fun. Well, it wasn’t that much fun to write, but it was interesting. I think I needed to write it, to teach myself some technical skills.
AK: And then?
DE: Then “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” then “Broken Glass.”
AK: There are certain sorts of women in some of the stories—perhaps they attract each other, or create each other—a confident, rapacious woman and a nervous, naïve, inchoate sort of woman. I’m thinking of Cinder and Charlotte in “Flotsam,” Amanda and Jill in “The Robbery,” Marcia and Patty in “A Cautionary Tale,” and Melanie and Rachel from Pastorale.
DE: Well, I suppose they come from . . . me. I mean, thankfully things change when one gets older, but I remember being extremely attentive to, dazzled by, that sort of competence, that sort of confidence.
AK: How did your political consciousness grow?
DE: I’m not sure that it really has grown. I’d say that maybe what you’re calling a political consciousness is just an amalgamation of a few attitudes I’ve had from very early on that have been sort of forcibly refreshed from time to time.
For one thing, I was always rather acutely aware of inequities of various sorts, imbalances of power. I think many children are—after all, they don’t have much power, and most children aren’t in very benign situations, in my view. But that feeling never abated for me—the painful awareness of inequity—perhaps it was an element that my family was Jewish in a Midwestern suburb that was not Jewish—and I think it’s a simple jump from noting the fact of inequities to noting that different circumstances are bound to create different attitudes toward the same things.
That sounds moronic, but actually it’s something that has to be learned over and over again, at least in my case, because it’s really easy to lose sight of. It’s very difficult to remember that not only are other people experiencing things that are quite different from what you’re experiencing but also that the difference is important and it doesn’t go away when you yourself stop thinking about it. And the more privileged you are, the more comfortable you are, the more obtuse you’re likely to be about the experience that other people are having, the fact that the experience of other people is different from yours and every bit as real.
I’ve always—always—been marked by my class. I mean, there are things I will never know about the world that any factory worker knows. Even when I’ve done menial or degrading or unpleasant work, even when I’ve felt that my financial prospects are disastrous, I’ve always had a big cushion of a middle-class background and middle-class expectations.
As a child, I had a rather tortured relationship with the people who were known as “the help.” My mother did not, possibly because she had grown up poor, or relatively so. She was untroubled, I suppose, because she was just hiring people to help her do the work she couldn’t get done by herself. But I felt awful about it. I suppose I had some awareness that I’d been born inalterably on the winning side of certain relationships.
Then when I was seventeen, I had the great good fortune to be sort of accidentally involved in an amazing civil rights thing. It had to do with the Highlander Folk School, a really wonderful institution, founded by Myles Horton, who had initially been very active in labor issues with the Cumberland miners. His son Thorstein, named for Thorstein Veblen, I believe, went to the same boarding school that I did, and he invited me to come down to Tennessee in the summer and join in on a project. The school had been burned down some time before, and we were in the Smokies, building a campsite, and the local police came up in the middle of the night and arrested us and took us to jail.
But the fact is, they wanted to kill us. I was charged with “assimilated intercourse,” which meant interracial sex shows or something. Well, I was seventeen, and it was about two in the morning, and we were all asleep after a hard day of work, and I wasn’t having any kind of intercourse. They took us down the mountain into town, and into jail, and in a couple of weeks there was an actual trial. And when the cops realized I was a minor, they transferred the charge to the one other white girl, who was eighteen.
As I remember, “assimilated intercourse” was a hanging charge, or anyhow, someone said it was, but fortunately it was completely obvious that the cops weren’t even trying to make any of the charges, which were plentiful, look legitimate. And somehow we were all let off with fines. They had refrained from killing us, apparently, in the first place, to make an example of us, but looking back at it from this vantage, that trial feels like a triumph of the justice system. I mean, when one thinks of the privatizations of prisons and immigrants in detention camps and the undermining of habeas corpus, to say nothing of Guantanamo and “extraordinary renditions” and so on, that courtroom seems to have represented a tiny, fleeting golden age of American justice.
AK: What did they look like, the people who arrested you?
DE: I don’t remember. That is, in my memory they were wearing Klan sheets with their badges pinned on them, but I simply can’t believe my memory is accurate. I’m pretty sure my memory of the sheriff’s daughter is reasonably accurate, though. She was about to go to teacher’s college or something. It was the early sixties, you know, but it could have been the forties. She had blond ringlets, and a blue gingham dress. And she sat demurely in the courtroom and took notes.
AK: That’s amazing. What happened? Did your parents come down?
DE: No, actually. Things were terrible then with my mother, and had been for a long time—everything she did drove me absolutely crazy, everything I did drove her absolutely crazy. It happened, also, to be the summer my brother was getting married, and everyone was very anxious that the wedding go smoothly. Which it did, actually—it was lovely. But anyhow, I was allotted my one phone call, and I called my mother and said,“Hi, Ma, guess I can’t get home yet—I’m in jail!” and she said, “You’re coming home right now.” And I said, “Er, well, I can’t—” and she said, “No excuses.”
AK: She didn’t understand.
DE: She didn’t. Neither did I, really. I thought, I’m from Winnetka, nothing can happen to me! It was the next summer that the three boys [Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney] were murdered in Mississippi.
But the especially valuable lessons from that experience were reserved for my return home. Because when I got back, lots of people expressed interest or curiosity about what things were like where I had been, and when I told them, they flatly didn’t believe it. I had been there and they hadn’t, but they didn’t believe me. Of course there were certainly those who knew that real courage was required of black people in the South—and the North, for that matter—but for the most part it was clear that this fact only retained its reality for a moment at a time, and the rest of the time it was like a movie that was over. That was true for me, too. There were moments when I had some insight that the life of another person went on coherently from one moment to the next, but for the most part, the lives of people I’d just met would be vividly real to me one moment, and the next moment it was as if no experience but my own was legitimate, as if there was in fact no experience but my own. Mine was the only experience that was wholly real to me for more than a minute or so, but at least I’d learned that. I mean, at least I’d learned how much I wasn’t taking in.
AK: Then later you went to Central America with Wall, which shows up in both of your work, in stories like “Broken Glass” and “Holy Week” and in Wall’s play The Fever. Did you go in the eighties?
DE: In the late eighties and early nineties.
AK: I always notice that your most caustic characterizations are of Americans abroad, people whose only interest in another land is where to get a good steak and how to relieve the locals of their indigenous textiles.
DE: Yes. And I include myself in that characterization. I mean, I’m one of them.
AK: What happened there? And what did you come back with, besides textiles? What did you come home knowing that you hadn’t known?
DE: Nothing. Well, except for a great deal of information about where, exactly, I was situated in the workings of the planet, and what, exactly, was being done to certain people on my behalf. But in essence I’d been horrifyingly reminded of how parochial I am, of how difficult it is to learn, if you’re in a comfortable position, what went into the construction of that position, and how extremely important it is to make an effort to learn what that was—where you fit in.
It’s always a shock. It can never be assimilated, at least if you’re reasonably privileged, reasonably comfortable, you can never fully understand or accept it, that your particular experience is neither inevitable nor dominant in the world. People vary of course in their capacity to comprehend the reality of someone else, to comprehend the humanity of somebody else. Did you see the photograph of the Rutgers women’s basketball team in the Times a few days ago?
AK: They were so beautiful!
DE: They were so beautiful. And the expressions on their faces—of such serious, painful, judicious reflection! And it was so fascinating to hear Don Imus, in contrast, trying to “explain” himself. He couldn’t really understand what the fuss was about. He seemed genuinely confused that anyone would censure him, because in his mind he had just been making jokes about things that weren’t real: women.
I don’t know, I have no way of evaluating, but I do suspect that our particular culture has made itself unusually expert in dehumanizing other people and instructing people how to estrange from themselves the experience of people not themselves. Or the experience of people who are themselves, actually. For example, what about this prevalent, hair-raisingly weird attitude a lot of people seem to have that they themselves aren’t real unless they’re on TV! That their lives must be reflected in order to be actual—a complete inversion between internal and external. Television has been a very powerful instrument, in many ways, in colluding in this thing, a sort of derangement of humanness, that does have rather immense political consequences. And, yes, when we returned from Central America and were asked what was going on, we were received with a chorus of, “No. No. That’s not happening. You didn’t see that, you didn’t hear that. You didn’t understand the context, you were naïve.”
AK: That willful ignorance shows up in a number of stories: “Broken Glass,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “Holy Week,” all terrifying stories that take up the problem of not knowing what one should know. And the people who do know, who are able to hear, are driven almost crazy by what they know. They fall apart, their speech falls apart, they decompensate. Like Beale, in “Someone to Talk To,” and Susan in the “Robbery.”
DE: We live in a bubble. Everybody outside it, outside this tiny milieu, knows exactly what’s going on. Yet unless we happen to meet or know someone who lives outside it, or we have a special motivation to find out, we’ll be ignorant, no matter how “well educated” we are or if we read the Times every day front and back. Well, that will only embroider your ignorance, really. You really have to ferret out the information. When we went to Central America, I realized that a six-year-old child in El Salvador, a six-year-old, knew exactly who I was, and what I represented. I didn’t know. I was there trying to figure it out. But the child knew.
AK: What did you represent?
DE: The very day we arrived in San Salvador, in fact, a huge graffito appeared on the U.S. Embassy. Like a lot of U.S. embassies I’ve seen, it was up on a hill, like a fortress, surrounded by a high wall and barbed wire, and so on, but someone had managed to get up there and paint, in Spanish, of course, “In this building is planned the torture and murder of the Salvadoran people.” The next time we saw the embassy it was gone. I imagine the person who’d gotten the words up there didn’t last so long, either.
If one is American one has to be very resourceful, very motivated, to find out what’s going on, because you won’t find out from TV, and rarely will you read something in the mainstream media that conflicts with the views useful to the corporations that own the mainstream media. There are lots of people very motivated not to tell you what’s happening. Well, look at the war. Billions of dollars going “to the war,” but what can that possibly mean? “The war” is an abstraction. Where, actually, does all that money go? It’s not going to the soldiers. They’re not adequately armed, they’re not protected, they’re poorly paid, they’re poorly cared for, they’re not underinsured, when they come home wounded or disabled or traumatized, the treatment they receive is very inadequate, or they’re actually disqualified for treatment. All that money is not going to the soldiers, so where is it going? It’s going to buy airplanes, tanks, bombers—all sorts of instruments of annihilation that are manufactured by U.S. corporations. It’s going to private military contractors like Blackwater, mercenary outfits, in short, which are run by private corporations from the U.S. A large amount of it is going to “reconstruction.” That is, to huge corporations like Halliburton, and Bechtel, to reconstruct—or, it seems, to not reconstruct—at great profit, what has been destroyed by the army and the airplanes and the tanks and so on that similar corporations manufacture.
AK: So there’s no motivation not to destroy, when they profit from the reconstruction.
DE: Exactly. And now of course the big joke is that Halliburton is going to Dubai, where they won’t have to pay U.S. taxes. So, in short, you and I, with our U.S. tax payments, who are funding profit-making corporations to knock things down and get people killed. Because also, when you think about it, who are these “insurgents”? What does that word mean in this context? It means people who want the U.S. to get out of their country and stop destroying it.
AK: That truth, and the fact that we don’t hear about it, or listen for it, fuels “Revenge of the Dinosaurs.” Everyone is quarreling about her own little agenda, and no one is noticing that Nana is dying, and people are getting beaten up on the street, and the TV news is showing explosions. Nana, who once wrote a book on economics, on currency, is no longer compos mentis. And she’s the only one who would have been able to look at the violence on television and say, “That is about money. That is money, there.”
DE: Yes.
AK: Is it possible to be an American and live an ethical life?
DE: Well, that’s the question. For the middle class—there used to be a huge middle class, but of course there hardly is one any longer—if you vote, and pay taxes, you’re contributing to all kinds of destruction. Our money enriches big corporation and kills poor people at home and elsewhere. As we sit here, people are being killed, with our money. But what is there to do? On, in fact, Amy Goodman’s show, I heard an interview with a woman who led a group of tax resisters, all of whom withhold portions of their taxes on moral grounds. As it happened, I was just on my way uptown to see my tax accountant, and make out my tax checks. Well, the woman was saying, “Nothing that can happen to a tax resister in the U.S. can possibly compare to the horror that we’re inflicting on people in Iraq.” And I thought, That’s so true. I’m going to go tell my accountant that I’m going to withhold my taxes. Then Amy Goodman asked her what happens to tax resisters. And the woman said, “Well, some property has been confiscated—some of our members’ homes.” And after another moment she said, “And some of our members are in prison.” And I thought, Plan B.
I know she’s right, I passionately share her views, but not passionately enough to emulate her courage. So, in regard to your question—I think that I, and the overwhelming majority of people in this country would be considered perfectly nice, decent, upright people, if we happened to be living in other countries. But our private and local selves are overshadowed, now, by our public and global selves. I’m talking now about people like myself, who would be considered fiscally stable. It gets more complicated, obviously, when you think about the rapidly growing population of the impoverished. I can’t do anything about my disproportionate power—none of us seem to be able to do anything about our disproportionate power unless it’s something extreme almost to the point of self-immolation in one way or another. So the circumstances of our life, the historical circumstances, decree that we’re villains, no matter what our convictions or character, unless we’re willing to risk a lot more than I, at least, have thus far had the courage to risk.
AK: What I really don’t understand, though, is how people like Dick Cheney can be so wrong, how they can not believe in the personhood of others. They don’t understand the least thing about human feelings. I had a cab driver recently who knew more than Cheney—he said to me, “You come in my house, I throw roses on you?” meaning, of course, how ridiculous it was to invade another country and expect to be greeted as “liberators.” But Cheney—he has children, he has daughters. How can he not know that other people are real?
DE: That would be the one to figure out. Because if you could understand Dick Cheney, you could understand everything. I mean, I think it’s very likely that Dick Cheney had no expectation of being greeted as a liberator—though I think there were people in the administration, I’d guess including George Bush, who were sufficiently ill-informed to believe that they would be—but I don’t imagine that Cheney cared in the least how he’d be greeted.
AK: We’re skipping over a lot—the stories that use Europe as a setting and a force, stories that use addictions as settings and forces, extraordinary stories about children and young people like “The Custodian” and “Mermaids” and “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor,” but I want to ask you about the most recent collection, Twilight of the Superheroes. I notice that in the title story you come back to the division of the story into pieces that you used way back when, in “Days.” And the web of characters we’re used to seeing gets even more broad. Did you—did those fragments have anything to do with the enormous intensity of the material [the immediate experience of 9/11]?
DE: I don’t know. I don’t think that was intentional. The broad range of characters is what I needed, I think, to represent a range of experiences. What I was focused on was representing what that huge event felt like in the moment before all the reactions inevitably set in. What was it like before we knew that this thing would come to be called “9/11”? I was in Virginia on that day, and as I remember, my class was ultimately cancelled, but not before a number people had gathered. I think I said, “We just don’t know what this is—if it’s one horrible event that will be swallowed by history or whether it’s the beginning of something.” And one of the students said, “Yes, it might be the beginning of terrorist attacks all over the country.” And that had never crossed my mind, strangely enough. I was thinking with apprehension of the retaliations and the political hay that would be made of it—and the things that I feared obviously came to pass.
AK: I’m curious about Kate, the protagonist of “Like It or Not” in the recent collection. Along with perhaps Lynnie in “The Custodian,” she’s one of the most conventionally middle-American characters you’ve explored. Who is she to you? And how and why did it occur to you to send her to Europe?
DE: I don’t remember how—possibly I was just utilizing some stuff that was ready to hand, a fairly recent trip to Italy—and I don’t know why. I suppose I just needed her to have an experience that might painfully reawaken a longing for a romance, and Europe is very good for that.
AK: I’d also like to hear you talk about “Some Other, Better Otto,” in this recent collection. It strikes me as perhaps the most intimate of your stories, the most undiluted portrait of a person in persistent, insoluble emotional pain. How did that story start, and grow?
DE: I’m very happy with your characterization of that story. There have been lots of readers who just feel that Otto is an unpleasant person, which I certainly don’t. All I remember about the genesis of that story is that it started very unfruitfully with a couple, or two couples—in some scrawlings they were heterosexual couples and in others they weren’t. It went nowhere, and I put it aside. But then from its ashes another story arose later, and that one started with my feelings about the sister—with Otto’s feelings about her.
AK: Do you feel your project or projects as a writer have substantially changed, in the years you’ve been writing?
DE: I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I suppose my effort has been a consistent one—I just keep trying to make something out of words that you’d think couldn’t be made out of words.