A LIFE IN WORDS

IBS: Combining a Sisyphean task with Kafkian absurdity, moral awakening, and a touch of Buddhist philosophy, The Music of Chance recounts the strange story of a lonely fireman’s quest for personal integrity. When Nashe inherits a large sum of money, he divests himself of all ties, sets off in his red Saab, and gives himself completely over to the freedom of the road until he meets the gambler Jack Pozzi. They lose everything to a pair of dangerously eccentric millionaires and end up detained at the end of a maze carting the stones from an ancient Irish castle across a meadow to build a wall that has no function whatsoever. Are there any elements in The Music of Chance taken from your own life?

PA: Essentially, no. I don’t see any autobiographical component in The Music of Chance—except the scene when Nashe discovers Pozzi’s beaten-up body. I wasn’t aware of it while I was writing the book, but it probably has some connection to the boy who was struck and killed by lightning.³⁵ That scene had a tremendous emotional resonance for me, and I think it must go back to that terrible moment when I was holding the dead body of my friend in my arms. When you’re writing a novel, you enter a state of hypersensitivity to everything around you. Things start bursting in on you, unexpected things that can wind up becoming a part of the book. Some of The Music of Chance was composed in Vermont. Siri, baby Sophie, and I were there for the summer, and my British editor, Robert McCrum, came to visit us. On a whim, we ate lobsters for dinner one night. The next day, when I sat down to write the scene about the prostitute visiting Nashe and Pozzi in the trailer, I used the lobsters. The other thing to say in this connection is that the day I finished the final draft of The Music of Chance was November 9, 1989. Can you imagine? I’m writing a book about the building of a wall, and then the wall that embodied the Cold War, the symbol of an entire era of history, was destroyed. Another one of those weird synchronicities . . .

PA: No meaning whatsoever. Other than that, no, I can’t think of anything taken from real life. The book was inspired by the end of the previous book, Moon Palace. Marco is driving out West in a red car, the car is stolen, and he makes the rest of the trip to the coast on foot. After I finished the novel, I said to myself, “I want to get back into that red car.” So, the next book begins with a man driving around in a red car, in this case a red Saab.

IBS: There are often echoes from previous books in your novels, but, as far as I can tell, the red car is just about the only cross-reference in The Music of Chance.

PA: It’s a self-contained work—part novel, part fable. Right from the start, I considered it a story about power. In some sense, even though not a word is mentioned about politics, I think it’s one of the most political books I’ve written. There is, however, one element inspired by a play I wrote in my twenties, Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven:³⁶ the idea of two men having to build a wall. I was always disappointed with the play, but this one image stayed with me, and I went back to it and started exploring it again.

IBS: Could we say that Nashe’s journey in The Music of Chance goes from fairly radical divestment (of family ties) through unrestrained freedom (on the road) to bondage (in the meadow)?

PA: I would describe Nashe’s journey as a slow process of moral awakening. When he was free to do whatever he wanted, his life was empty. He had abdicated all his connections to other people: he reluctantly left his daughter behind and neglected his relationship with his girlfriend, Fiona. He was living what one might call a life of selfishness and self-indulgence. Essentially an absurd life. It’s not until he’s finally constrained and put in a position of bondage, as you put it, that he’s forced to stop running away from himself and take responsibility for someone else: Pozzi. In this interaction with the Other, he grows into a different kind of human being, and the period in the meadow is fundamental for this development.

IBS: In fact, he jumps at the chance of applying himself to this preposterous task of building a wall, which has no purpose whatsoever.

PA: He sees it as an opportunity. Pozzi, of course, is horrified, as any normal person would be.

IBS: Prior to that, Nashe had abandoned his loved ones and spent thirteen months on the road in a kind of existential limbo.

It was a dizzying prospect—to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. (6)

Choice, it seems, is of no consequence here. Does this mean that freedom renders him powerless to take charge of his own life?

PA: He thinks that cutting all ties will leave him completely free, but he’s deluding himself. It’s not freedom, it’s an addiction. He becomes a prisoner of his own desire for freedom. The paradox is that he doesn’t become free until he’s prepared to be bound by friendship and moral obligation.

IBS: Quinn in City of Glass and Marco Fogg in Moon Palace also give their lives over to more or less aimless movement. They do so with little, if any, reflection on cause and aim, but for Nashe, as you say, there is an articulated purpose to his divestment:

There was a certain pain involved in these transactions, but Nashe almost began to welcome that pain, to feel ennobled by it, as if the farther away he took himself from the person he had been, the better off he would be in the future. He felt like a man who had finally found the courage to put a bullet through his head—but in this case the bullet was not death, it was life, it was the explosion that triggers the birth of new worlds. (10)

PA: The idea of dispossession seems to recur fairly often in my early books. In each case, however, the circumstances are different. Fogg is a young person, alone in a way that few people are . . .

PA: Yes, but Fogg is a much younger character. He’s toying with the idea of living his life as a work of art. For him, divestment is a grand gesture, something characteristic of a late-adolescent romantic boy. With Nashe it’s a mature and conscious act.

PA: There’s impulse as well as reflection. It was a big blow when his wife left him. Nashe feels he has failed, and he’s hoping to find a new and better way to live. He misses that chance. After a year and a month on the road, the experiment is getting a little tired, but he’s unable to stop. Pozzi becomes his excuse to rethink his life once again.

The days passed, and even though there was rarely a moment when they were not together, he continued to say nothing about what truly concerned him—nothing about the struggle to put his life together again, nothing about how he saw the wall as a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes, nothing about how he welcomed the hardships of the meadow as a way to atone for his recklessness and self-pity. (127)

IBS: Why is atonement so important for Nashe? As I see it, his sins are not that great.

PA: He atones “for his recklessness and self-pity”; he atones, essentially, for being stupid. Building the wall is an arbitrary, absurd task, but he decides that if he seriously applies himself to it and fulfills his obligations, it will become a redeeming act for him, no matter how meaningless the job might be. His desire to take it on gives it significance. He invests it with a purpose. Building that wall, isn’t that like making a work of art? It’s not useful, but you can look at it as a kind of sculpture in the meadow. Art has no utilitarian function either.

IBS: It’s just that this wall is made of stones that used to be part of a castle that was once alive and vibrant and served a multitude of functions. Now they are just sitting there, ten thousand gray slabs in the middle of nowhere. They’re being turned into something that has no purpose and, at least as I see it, no beauty.

PA: I think walls can be beautiful. You have these ancient Irish stones out there in a meadow in Pennsylvania. Maybe it will lead to something interesting.

IBS: All right, but it’s just a perfectly straight line, no curves, nothing irregular or surprising—and nobody will ever see it!

PA: Walls are complicated; they can keep you in, but they can also keep you out. They have a double edge to them: imprisonment and protection.

PA: I just have to say, nothing is symbolic here. It is what it is. We’re talking about the stuff of dreams. If you find a way to put those dreams into words, to form the precise image of those dreams, it can be haunting. I don’t fully understand it myself. The only justification I have for writing it down and putting it in the book is that it feels right. It says something to me, even if I can’t fully articulate what that thing is.

IBS: If we go back to the possible connection between Nashe in The Music of Chance and Quinn in City of Glass, in both cases we have a constitutive phase of aimless movement.

IBS: And they both reach a “nowhere”: Quinn in the streets of Manhattan, Nashe here in the meadow. What are these voids?

PA: It’s difficult for me to talk about these things. They rise up out of the unconscious and have little to do with rational thought. If you look at the two cases from a psychological perspective, Quinn is a person whose life has been interrupted and damaged. He’s in mourning still. He’s a suffering human being. His selfhood is a burden to him. The aimless walks help him to empty himself out. They give him the lightness-of-being he craves. Nashe is perhaps not quite as damaged as Quinn, but he’s confused and unsettled. Then a bucket of money comes showering down on him, and he can afford to quit his job. They’re different people, Nashe and Quinn, but they both find an escape from the burden of reflective self-consciousness in movement.

IBS: There’s a feeling of inevitability about these wanderings, I think, and I’m intrigued by the ambiguous relationship between chance and purpose in your early writing. You are so focused on randomness, and yet, there’s an undercurrent of something else: a sense of governance or direction that would seem to work entirely against the grain of contingency. It’s suggested in The Music of Chance, for instance, when Nashe steals the miniature representation of Flower and Stone from the City of the World. This act unleashes a torrent of bad luck—or so it would seem.

He was not sure why he had done it, but the last thing he was looking for just then was a reason. Even if he could not articulate it to himself, he knew that it had been absolutely necessary. He knew that in the same way he knew his own name. (97)

PA: The story is complicated by the fact that Nashe leaves the gambling room during their break. At that point, Pozzi is ahead, and Nashe thinks he’s going to win. He’s becoming a little bored, so he goes upstairs and ponders the City of the World. For reasons he himself can’t understand, he steals the miniature of Flower and Stone. I have to say, that moment, when he pinches the figure, came as a surprise to me as well. When I sat down to work that day, I had no idea it was going to happen. Suddenly, he puts it in his pocket. It was almost as if Nashe did it himself and I was just writing it down. This often happens to me with my characters. You get inside them and pretty soon they’re telling you what they’re going to do. I’m not manipulating them. I had a fascinating conversation about this lack of “authority” with a Hollywood producer.³⁷ There had been several people interested in the film rights, among them an old veteran of Hollywood who had made some successful films in the past. He kept saying, in the exaggerated way of Hollywood producers, “Nobody in the world loves this book more than I do, and we have to make it into a film.” I said, “Well, that’s nice to know.” “But there’s one thing,” he continued, “those men who disappear, Flower and Stone, I think we should have them come back into the story because they’re so interesting.” I said, “No, they can’t come back. It’s extremely important that they don’t come back.” He said, “But you can change it. You wrote it, so you can do anything you want.” I said, “No, actually, I can’t do anything I want. I have to do what the characters tell me they have to do.” We couldn’t get past this idea, so I turned down his offer.

PA: He had no idea what I was talking about. He thought, “Well, if you’re the author, you can tell any story you want, and therefore you can manipulate it in any way you want.” That’s not how it works. Not for me. There’s some kind of inevitability in the truth of the things you’ve discovered and the way the story must develop. It never even occurred to me that Flower and Stone would reappear. They had to leave.

IBS: Of course, the reader also hopes they’ll come back. We want to know what happened, but you leave everything in the dark.

IBS: When Nashe removes the wooden figure, Pozzi believes some sort of divine balance has been upset:

We had everything in harmony. We’d come to the point where everything was turning into music for us, and then you had to go upstairs and smash all the instruments. You tampered with the universe, my friend, and once a man does that, he’s got to pay the price. I’m just sorry I have to pay it with you. (138)

It’s strange how Pozzi, the very embodiment of chance and pot luck, needs to ascribe meaning to fluke events.

PA: Now we’re talking about “mechanics of reality” again. I’ve never said, in any of my works, that chance is an all-dominant force that controls everything—it’s one element in an infinitely complex totality of forces. We have the freedom to make decisions, to set goals for ourselves, but, as we know, accidents happen, random events often intervene. That’s what I call chance. It can be a destructive force, it can be a positive force. It’s neutral. Another word for it might be “the unexpected.”

PA: I usually have the title of a book when I start, but the title for this one didn’t come to me until I was about halfway through. There was a provisional title, but I was planning to drop it when something better occurred to me. It was named after a piece of music by Couperin, “Les Barricades Mystérieuses” (The Mysterious Barricades). It’s a harpsichord piece in which, at any given moment, only one note is played. There are no chords. It’s sublimely beautiful. I knew this title was too heavy, but I held onto it for a while, hoping I would eventually find another one. One Saturday, I was waiting in line at the supermarket here in Brooklyn, half-listening to the piped-in music wafting through the store. Suddenly, the phrase “the music of chance” popped into my head—out of nowhere. It was a strange moment. I thought, “That’s the title of the book!” It’s a contradiction, of course. Music is not chance, unless it’s John Cage or something written intentionally against the spirit of music. Traditionally, music has always been about something close to mathematics: organized, orderly. The idea that chance creates its own kind of music means there’s a pattern. If we substitute “pattern” for “music,” you get a sense of what the title implies.

IBS: It’s the impression I sometimes get from reading The Music of Chance and some of the earlier work, that you attribute a kind of meaning to coincidence. I realize that you don’t. For you, it’s all arbitrary, even so . . .

PA: I don’t do it, but sometimes the characters do. They see things happening, and they think those random events are connecting in the same way Pozzi thinks that Nashe broke the rules by stealing the little figure. To me it’s absurd, but that’s his cockeyed view of the world. Nashe tries to argue with him.

“It’s a piece of wood, isn’t it? A stupid little piece of wood. Isn’t that right, Jack?”

“If you say so.”

“And yet you believe this little scrap of wood is stronger than we are, don’t you? You think it’s so strong, in fact, that it made us lose all our money.” (140)

IBS: This exchange reminds me of biblical Abraham in his father’s workshop, remember? They were making wooden idols of gods and Abraham insulted the customers by insisting they were merely worshipping a carved piece of wood that couldn’t possibly contain divine power.

IBS: If we look at The Red Notebook, it centers on these random but magical coincidences. Even so, it’s an autobiographical text. The speaker is you.

PA: All I’m saying in those stories is that life is a lot stranger and more unpredictable than most of us want it to be. It’s almost unbearable to think that so much of what happens is arbitrary. We just can’t tolerate that.

IBS: There’s solitude and loneliness in this book too. At the beginning, Nashe craves detachment:

He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin. (7)

Eventually, he ends up “crazy with loneliness” (201) and destroys himself in a mad act of revenge.

PA: I’m not sure he dies. It’s not clear. There’s definitely going to be a crash, but it may not be a fatal one. We don’t know. The vehicle coming toward him has one headlight, so it could be a motorcycle. Or a car missing a headlight. I deliberately closed the story before the end. I wanted to show that Nashe had reached a new stage in his inner development, that he had come to a place where he was willing to accept anything that came his way. Whether it was life or death, whether it was freedom or not. What matters is that he’s prepared to destroy himself. That was the point I wanted to make. He has transcended his own boundaries; he has become a greater person. He’s been set free inside himself. It’s a new awareness of who he is and who he can be. Of course, he’s certain that they’ve murdered Pozzi, and Nashe loves Pozzi. When he picks up his broken body, it’s devastating, and he’s consumed with rage. Remember, he then goes through that long period when he wants to kill the child. He’s so filled with a desire for revenge, as you say, that he even contemplates murdering a child. This, I think, is the most horrifying moment in the book.

IBS: Nashe and Pozzi are an unlikely pair, and yet they form a strong bond of trust and loyalty. What’s the magic between them?

PA: Initially, Nashe is simply amused by Pozzi. He’s such a colorful character, such a confident character, one of those little guys who thinks he owns the world. Then he realizes that Pozzi is not stupid, he’s got his own values, and Nashe respects him for that. In the end, Nashe looks on him almost as a kind of son. When they have to pay back their debt, he says to Pozzi,

You’re a free man, Jack. You can walk out now, and I won’t hold it against you. That’s a promise. No hard feelings.

Do you really think I’d leave you alone, old man? If you did that work yourself, you’d probably drop dead of a heart attack. (111)

IBS: Yes, Nashe places all his trust in Pozzi from the very beginning. He even invests the last of his money in Pozzi’s poker game. Why does he have so much faith in this cocky little gambler?

PA: He wants to take the risk. He thinks it will embolden him—to know that he is strong enough to chuck everything away on a mere whim. Nashe and Pozzi met by chance, and their relationship is based on chance. They are in the gamble together, and for a while they form one of those special pairs of oddly matched men I wrote about in Hand to Mouth.

IBS: What about the other male pair in The Music of Chance, William Flower and William Stone?

PA: They were inspired by Laurel and Hardy, but I was also thinking about Bouvard and Pécuchet and most likely about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as well. I’ve always been fascinated by these mismatched pairs. The skinny one and the fat one. So, I invented those two. They seem to be charming, silly, jovial fellows, but at bottom, no, they’re crazy and brutal.

IBS: Yes they are. Flower and Stone also construct meaning where none apparently exists. They do it mostly in order to inflate their own sense of omnipotence. For instance, Flower insists that “each number has a personality of its own” (73) and is convinced that he and Stone have worked out “the magic combination, the key to the gates of heaven” (74) in something as quintessentially random as a lottery ticket.

PA: He was an accountant. He dealt with numbers all his life. I think the feeling that each number has a different personality comes from my childhood. It’s something common in children.

PA: I know, but he hasn’t given up this magical way of thinking. The arbitrary sign, whether a number or letter, can be invested with meaning if we choose to give it meaning. There’s no real justification for it. It’s a human impulse.

IBS: He is a bit of a megalomaniac, isn’t he? For instance, he says, “It’s as though God has singled us out from other men.” (75)

PA: He’s a bombastic, pompous blowhard. You have to understand that the two of them are stunted and infantile. Flower is the collector, and Stone is the artist. Flower collects historical artifacts with a kind of obsession, things owned by celebrated people. Stone is building an elaborate miniature model of a universal city with himself and Flower as centerpieces.

IBS: Flower describes Stone’s City of the World as an artistic vision of mankind. He says,

In one way, it’s an autobiography, but in another way, it’s what you might call a utopia—a place where the past and future come together, where good finally triumphs over evil. (79)

PA: That’s right, and now they have two live prisoners. Stone is a skilled craftsman, and Nashe is astonished by the complexity and beauty of his work. At first glance, it seems to be a glorious project, but on closer inspection it becomes horrifying.

Flower’s museum was a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness. (84)

PA: Flower wants to possess things, and by obtaining these objects for himself, it’s as if he’s controlling the world. It’s as if he owns the past. Here’s the description of the items:

The telephone that had once sat on Woodrow Wilson’s desk. A pearl earring worn by Sir Walter Raleigh. A pencil that had fallen from Enrico Fermi’s pocket in 1942. General McClellan’s field glasses. A half-smoked cigar filched from an ashtray in Winston Churchill’s office. A sweatshirt worn by Babe Ruth in 1927. William Seward’s Bible. The cane used by Nathaniel Hawthorne after he broke his leg as a boy. A pair of spectacles worn by Voltaire. (83)

As it says here, “It was all so random, so misconstrued, so utterly beside the point” (83–84).

The fascination was simply for the objects as material things, and the way they had been wrenched out of any possible context, condemned by Flower to go on existing for no reason at all: defunct, devoid of purpose, alone in themselves now for the rest of time. It was the isolation that haunted Nashe, the image of irreducible separateness that burned down into his memory, and no matter how hard he struggled, he never managed to break free of it. (84)

I think this is a central passage in the book because it frames isolation through Flower’s removal of objects from their natural context. Isn’t this what they do also with the stones from the Irish castle? Removed from their origin and made homeless, suspended in a limbo of randomness—just like Nashe himself.

IBS: It’s this complete lack of purpose, or this context of nothingness, if you will, that upsets Nashe so deeply, right?

IBS: It’s as if it touches a raw nerve. Something that reminds him of his own life, perhaps?

PA: That’s possible. It’s just that Flower has severed these things from their context in such a way that they lose their meaning, and Nashe can’t understand why this man, with all this money, would waste his time trying to assemble a collection of useless things. It’s a splintering rather than a putting together. Nashe can’t bear any more dissociation, he wants to reassemble things.

IBS: That makes sense. Even if there’s no connection between the items in Flower’s collection, each individual object is invested with meaning, isn’t it?

PA: Sure, but it’s entirely subjective. If you saw James Joyce’s glasses and didn’t know they had once belonged to Joyce, they would just look like a pair of glasses to you. This is what Nashe thinks. Who cares about Churchill’s cigar or Fermi’s pencil? Or the telephone on Woodrow Wilson’s desk? It’s just a telephone, it’s just a pencil. They don’t mean anything.

PA: There are discarded objects in In the Country of Last Things and in Sunset Park, but here it’s the opposite. Flower is acquiring things, collecting them.

IBS: Yes, but the context in which he places them is a “shrine to the spirit of nothingness.” He’s not giving them a home. And being abandoned is one of the things that defines the objects in the other books: They’re lost, left, forgotten. They’re masterless. They’re just sitting there. There’s no context. They don’t belong.

PA: But there are many types of collectors and some very odd collections. Whatever patterns of meaning the collector attributes to what he owns is arbitrary and often highly idiosyncratic.

IBS: Okay, there are things that belong and things that don’t. I’m just trying to make sense of this. I think I find it more difficult to get my head around The Music of Chance than any of your other books. I’m not quite sure why . . .

PA: It’s difficult to talk about. Not just for you, but for me as well. Because it’s irreducible. What else can we say but: It is what it is. It’s filled with ambiguities, but at the same time, the truth of the story is in the tale that’s told—a fable that is also a novel, firmly grounded in the real world and yet also projecting itself as a kind of nightmare or hallucination.

IBS: Yes, the ambiguity frustrates, and these perplexing images remain. But the lack of certainty doesn’t make it any less interesting. On the contrary.

³⁷ A film adaptation of The Music of Chance, directed by Philip Haas, was released in 1993.