Upstairs at the Strand

images

WITH LUCAS WITTMANN

LUCAS WITTMANN

I’ve been struck by how both of you are such incredibly articulate, expressive people, and yet you are able to capture brilliantly how we are all so inexpressive, how inarticulate and often unable to communicate we can be. Deborah, I was looking at one of your short stories and noted down some phrases that you use, like “vaguely severe” and “kind of churchy.” This of course is how we all think and talk, when we are not having a chance to compose ourselves. I was curious to know how you were able to capture those brief moments of inexpressiveness.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Actually, inarticulateness comes very naturally to me.

LUCAS WITTMANN

You’re proving that not to be true.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

The story in which those particular phrases occur is very “voice-y,” and it was fun to utilize the complete confusion of natural speech. I enjoy doing it a lot. I don’t know what else to say about it, it’s just fun.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

It is fun. I grew up in Chicago, and one of my early experiences was watching the male neighbors, who were a little drunk but very earnest. They would have, obviously, fully developed emotional lives and longings, but then there would be kind of a crimped output valve. If someone tried to say that they loved you or that they found you outstanding, they would say, “You jag-off! You! You!” and they’d pretend to knee you in the groin. You come to understand that diction. One of my true breakthrough moments in writing was when I realized that this was actually a form of poetry, that any diction that you overflow, even if it’s inefficient on the surface, becomes beautiful when you kind of put the screws to it a little bit.

LUCAS WITTMANN

George, when you read out loud you use those voices, but do you write in those kind of voices, too?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I write in a lot better ones. I’ve got three voices that I do: a working-class guy, a rich guy, and a duck—I can do a pretty good duck. When I’m writing I hear them very well and when they come out, you sort of compromise the solution.

LUCAS WITTMANN

I’d like to ask you both about how you started writing. Deborah, with you, it was when you quit smoking, is that right?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

When I quit smoking, absolutely. It had to be one or the other, I guess. I was a very, very heavy smoker, and I absolutely loved smoking. But it became evident for various reasons that I had to quit. When I did I completely fell totally apart, because I was entirely structured around nicotine. I mean, nicotine was my blood, my life. A new person started to formulate. I was a monstrous person. I was a monster. It was just so awful. It’s horrible, it’s awful. But yes, if you smoke, do quit.

LUCAS WITTMANN

George, in your case you found your voice while you were on a conference call, yes?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I had been working for a long time. I had a medical condition called a “Hemingway boner.” I just loved him. I loved him! I did that thing that a lot of young writers do, where you take your interesting experiences and try to cram them down your reader’s throat, in some other writer’s voice. Of course, it didn’t work.

Then one day I was at this tech-writing job, and I was so bored that I jotted down these Seuss poems, kind of a little perverse, kind of like da-da-da-da-da-DA, da-da-da-da-da-DA. There’s this great reader I have—my wife—I mean she’s really brilliant, and just before this happened I’d written a book called La Boda de Eduardo, which I think means Ed’s Wedding. It must have been a seven-hundred-page book. When I gave it to her, like all writers, I said, “I’ll just let you take your time with this. I’ll check in tomorrow.” Two minutes later, I was under the table and looking up. She was on page three and had her head in her hands. So then I was writing these Dr. Seuss poems, and from the other room I heard her laughing. I understood it was okay to be a little funny, be a little high-velocity, to let what I considered all these low, working-class attributes, like humor and stuff, in. It was just like going around a corner after that.

LUCAS WITTMANN

Speaking of the word “class” … George, you have an interest in what’s happening to the middle class. Maybe it’s a nostalgia, a distant thing that never really was? What draws you to explore that? And Deborah, did you grow up in that?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I certainly did. When I was growing up, there was a huge middle class, that’s what this country was. And it was very stable. One assumed that there would always be a middle class. It had many, many fascinations, and many frustrating and disturbing elements. Now, to see it become incredibly eroded, and to feel that we’re on this huge planetary cliff of every sort, class, climate, everything … it couldn’t be more terrifying, more fascinating. Well, it’s just riveting.

LUCAS WITTMANN

We talk about it but in a kind of half-way.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Things are moving very, very fast. Who can understand what’s going on?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

In my class in Syracuse I teach Deborah’s Twilight of the Superheroes. What the kids love about it is that there’s this incredibly funny, intelligent surface and then there are those deep underlying ideas that come up. I always find that with your work, that I step into it and I can’t stop. You are writing about those things, but charm always comes first. My students fall in love with your work. I feel that sometimes when we discuss writing, it tends to be a little conceptual and reductive. What I’m trying to tell my students is that you can get themes and concepts and moralities, but you first have to charm the reader. You’re such a master of that.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Back at you.

LUCAS WITTMANN

And the middle class? You can’t quite dodge it entirely.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

In that Hemingway period I mentioned, I found out that the same minute I had an idea about what I wanted to write, life would go out of it. I’m a Bear of Little Brain, as Winnie the Pooh would say. My challenge is to try to keep the themes out of what I’m writing as long as possible. I often use this quote that I love by Gerald Stern. He said something like, “If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.” Einstein said it better: “No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception.” To me that means that if I get an idea about a story, and I think, “Oh, I’m writing about the lower middle class,” then I better be careful. You see, if that’s all you do, that’s all you’ve done. Rather, it’s got more integrity if it comes in of its own accord. When you start out to do this, it somehow seems it falls flat.

LUCAS WITTMANN

You mentioned teaching Deborah’s work. You both teach? Neither of you were taught. I’m curious how you compare being self-taught and teaching writing.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I did go through an MFA program, at Syracuse. With Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger. I had it handed to me, on a silver platter. They just told me what to do and I did it. It’s easy, once you know the secret.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I find it very puzzling to be teaching writing without ever having learned to write. I mostly define the task of teaching writing as trying to persuade students that there actually are no rules. That it can’t be learned in exactly that way. It’s an interesting analogy to what George was saying about imposing ideas on a piece of fiction or starting with an idea. You have to go about it in a much more internal way. The school model is a little dangerous, for writing students. What I have to offer is to say, “This is a false model.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I just got an email from Syracuse that says that there are six hundred applications for six spots this year. At that level you don’t have to teach them anything in particular, you have to get them up to their highest personal level. I find it’s psychological work. You get to know the person over the three years and at some critical point you can say something or make an edit and that points out at a deep level that they’re right about something or that they’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s very pleasant work, but I don’t think there’s methodology for sure.

LUCAS WITTMANN

How have you evolved as writers?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

When I was younger, I was for some stupid reason really taken aback by the realization that capitalism could be harsh. It had never occurred to me before. So my work tended to be a little preoccupied with that notion, maybe. My wife and I fell head over heels, and had our daughters pretty quickly. Now we’ve been married for twenty-six years and our daughters are grown up and wonderful. So lately my feeling is there ought to be a place for some fictional corollary of the fact that sometimes things actually work. Sometimes in fiction you put the baby near the cliff. And in this latest book of mine [Tenth of December], the baby doesn’t quite go over. Earlier it would have, earlier it would have gone over the cliff. Or into the latrine. An artist can sometimes represent the idea that things can be wonderful.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I don’t think my writing has gotten more cheerful, at all. It’s possibly gotten a little more complicated. That’s the only difference. I keep trying, trying, trying to express inexpressible things. I try to be able to articulate a few more of the contingencies, and strange nuances of life, as I go along.

LUCAS WITTMANN

You are both short story writers. And they say the short story is dead but this room is packed. You’re proof that it’s not. Why do you write short stories? Have you tried novels? Are you against them?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

This year I came across that Flannery O’Connor line, “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.” When a story is eight pages, I get it. I feel that I can make that live. I like the idea of expanding or developing, but when I get there, there’s no strong idea. I’ve got a vigorous inner nun that says, “Why are you taking so long, Mr. Saunders? What do you know?” My stuff, when it works, is like a windup toy. You wind it up and it hides under the couch as quickly as possible. It can even take only one wrong turn and the energy goes down and it’s dull. I’m not thrilled with this—with this idea of working from a limited skill-set—but I’m resigned to it.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Things take me forever to write, too. I love compression. Also, I feel a kind of almost squeamishness of taking even five words longer than I need. It offends my sensibility, in a way. It’s not that I don’t like to read long things. I do, I love to read long things. But when I’m working that’s how I feel.

LUCAS WITTMANN

George, at the beginning of the story “Victory Lap,” there’s this line: “Can goodness win?” It’s kind of an overarching question in your work.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Why not? Yes, it can win. But it can also lose—can get humiliated. It can also cause other people problems, by morphing into self-righteousness. I think what a fiction writer does is represent different viewpoints vividly. And without necessarily seeming to prefer one over the other. “Can goodness win?” “Yes, it does all the time.” “No, it cannot: it loses all the time.” Both true. There’s this passage in Gorky’s memoirs, where he takes a walk with Tolstoy in Russia—where they, being Russian, often walked—and there are these Hussars coming toward them. Tolstoy at this point is like a hundred and eighty and newly celibate, but he points out that those Hussars represent all that’s wrong with Russia: the arrogance, the aggression, the blind self-confidence. “Trust me,” is the sense of what he’s saying, “those traits will be the ruin of Russia.” Gorky thinks this is brilliant. And then the Hussars pass by with their swords clanking and their cologne. And Tolstoy turns on his heels, watches them go, and says, “On the other hand, that’s everything that’s good about us: the pride, the self-assertion, the confidence in a better future.” Gorky says, “Well, Leo, which is it?” And Tolstoy just sort of smiles, walks off. No answer. So … they’re both true, at once. Leave it just like that. See how long you can stay in that space, where both things are true. You, little mind, actually don’t have to decide. That’s a great place to try to be. And for a fiction writer, that’s the best place to be: you’ve put two apparently opposing truths in the air and you’re just letting them hang there, knowing that the real truth is … that opposition.

LUCAS WITTMANN

You both come across as very sane, happy people. Your stories are populated by characters who are complicated, or are tragic, and torn. Do you get your emotions out on the page?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

People, you know, have interiors. One doesn’t just walk around saying, Rrrrr! We have all kinds of things going on. People have experiences, and people have feelings. I would say that in one’s life, one does a certain amount of choosing about how one is going to be.

LUCAS WITTMANN

I wanted to ask Deborah about the Passivity Man, and how 9/11 is treated in one of your stories obliquely, but at times directly, too.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I don’t normally take notes, or keep a journal. But I started taking notes on that night, September 11th, 2001, because I felt that things were going to start changing immediately, as they did. I felt that it would be impossible to remember, accurately, what one’s experience was. The story took me three years to write. All that material had to be translated into something that was useful for fiction. I didn’t start writing a piece of fiction about it at all, but I was writing fiction. I couldn’t get rid of the horrible sensation of falsifying history practically as it’s rolling by underfoot. I just did not want to falsify it. The superhero Lucas mentioned is a comic book character that’s being invented by one of my characters. I don’t know how that developed or got in.

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

Do you believe that moniker is destiny? Deborah, refresh my memory—what did Deborah do in the Bible? George, which George would you be the reincarnation of?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

Clooney.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

Deborah was a judge, as I remember, but I don’t really remember.

George, you wrote some essays about authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain. Why? And Deborah, do you have any interest in pursuing any other nonfiction or essay writing? You wrote some rather nice book reviews of some great Central European novels.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

After my second book, I felt that I’d gotten a little cornered. Not that I couldn’t write, but I was a little stuck, aesthetically. I felt that if I wrote some other stuff it might break the jam. I feel intuitively that if you’re cramped you just have to lurch. Sometimes going into another form will loosen up the game a bit. At one point I got the fiction mojo back. It’s kind of a survival tactic—you just have to keep moving around.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

My experience was somewhat similar. I ran aground, I could not write any fiction that interested me, and I was given the opportunity to write some of those essays. Not a bunch, I mean one—I was given one, and then another, and another. I found it very refreshing and also very taxing. It took much longer than I expected. This kind of writing is interesting and very satisfying, because you have a much clearer idea of what the task is than you do with fiction. With fiction the problem, ultimately, is to invent the task.

When you guys hit a block in a piece, what tactics do you use to overcome that? Do you maybe change the point of view, put some distance, or just work on another piece?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

The only frank advice I can offer would be that, maybe, you can say to yourself that the obstacle is part of it. It’s not that you’re the one person who doesn’t understand story craft. That block is often the story going, “I’m not enough yet. Can you please help me expand?” It takes a certain amount of patience, maybe a little sense of humor, to acknowledge that this is happening, and that it is all right. It’s part of the process, rather than trauma—no use in simply blaming yourself for “doing it wrong.”

DEBORAH EISENBERG

There are obstacles, there just are. But they are information, in a way. There’s nothing you can do except be very patient. And yes, switching point of view is a good idea, switching settings. Just play, try to have a little fun. Obstacles are part of the process, and the obstacle that you hit is information.

What stories do you always teach?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I tend not to teach contemporary stories, but all kinds of other things. Let’s start with “Earthquake in Chile,” by Von Kleist, a great story. Isaac Babel stories are wonderful. I’ve taught some Joyce, some Faulkner, the usual suspects. Also Bolaño. And various things that my students might not encounter on their own.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I have this one exercise. It’s Hemingway, speaking of him. You take that story “Indian Camp.” It’s maybe eight pages or something. You divide it into two-page bits. I give them the first two pages. And we read in class and talk about it for way too long, longer than they’re content with. And you say, What’s up here? What has Hemingway got going in these first two pages? And then you give them the second two pages, and you see the way that story is just pure escalation. There’s nothing in that story that just sits, stable. And by the end they’re ready to kill you (because they want so badly to get to the end), but you can say, just before you hand out that last chunk: Okay, this is a masterpiece, you’ve got a page and a half left, is there anything left to do? And they say, No, not really, and then he does it anyway.

George, do you feel that there are any stories or characters that you’ve created that are really close to your heart?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

I don’t have characters or stories that really are. To me the proper thing is to be into it at the time, even crazily, to the point where even a comma is a fighting thing, to the point where you feel that the people in it are real. But the trick is to quickly get rid of it afterwards. You kind of go, “Ah, I failed again, time to go.”

How many stories are you working on at a time?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I think I’m working on one. I hope I’m working on one.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

When I’m going, I usually have two or three things on my desk, and see which one is most interesting. Then at some point, one of them surges ahead, and I kind of just lock down on that.

How much of your process is overwriting? Is it intentional?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

To what extent do we overwrite to get the final thing?

DEBORAH EISENBERG

I have to write reams and reams. Most of what I do is cutting.

GEORGE SAUNDERS

For voice-driven stories, I have to go, like, one hundred units to get twenty-five.

George, I think in Tenth of December there’s a theme about characters and the special destinies they imagine for themselves, that might not come to pass, or that may never give expression to themselves as fully as possible, or as they imagined. But your special destiny has come to pass. Can you speak about this irony?

GEORGE SAUNDERS

For me it’s not so much about special destiny but the moment-by-moment failure of one’s habitual approach. You could be a king or you could be a peasant, but you’ve got this thing going on in your mind that’s delusional. No matter what you’re doing, this victory narrative is not important; what’s important is that at any given moment you’re failing to see the way things actually are. The manifestation is that you’re failing to be kind. You’re anxious. You’re neurotic. I don’t think it’s so much about external things. I think you could be a very happy, high-functioning person and still note the moment-to-moment failures. I think you’re right about what the book is about, but I wouldn’t tie it to external wins and losses.