Jonathan Franzen - How He Came to Be Somewhere - An Interview and Three Early Stories

INTERVIEWER

Was there a similar quality to your reading?

FRANZEN

It slowly became more serious in the course of four years of college. I’d read a lot as a kid — eight hours a day all summer, some summers — but it was mostly mysteries and popular science and science fiction. Then, because I went to college as a prospective physics major, I took only one class in English literature during my first three years, a survey of the modern English novel. Predictably, I was most smitten with Iris Murdoch. I was eighteen, and A Severed Head seemed to me a profound and important book.

The one writer I completely couldn’t stand was D. H. Lawrence. I wanted to kill him for having inflicted Sons and Lovers on me. Much later, I went back and read the book again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and Patty material in Freedom had some kinship with the Morels. And I could see why I’d hated it when I was eighteen: It hit way too close to home. But frankly I still found it kind of unbearable. I wanted to say to Lawrence, No, you have not found a way not to make Mrs. Morel’s sexualized engulfment of her son icky and excruciating. In a way, it’s great and heroic that Lawrence was willing to write such an excruciating book, to lay it all out there. But for me the book also became a shining example of how not to approach this radioactive material — a reminder of the pressing need to find a structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make it fun .

My real problem with the survey class was that I was too young for it. Like most eighteen-year-olds, I didn’t have enough experience to understand what the stakes even were in adult literature. Because I hadn’t grown up in a household that placed any value on culture, literature was just a game to me, and writing was just a craft that I hoped to make a living with someday. I wrote whatever the newspaper editors assigned me to write and worked on my sentences.

INTERVIEWER

Do you recall any pieces in particular?

FRANZEN

The piece I had the most fun with was a fall campus-fashion preview. I wrote it as a joke, in very ornate prose.

INTERVIEWER

There are several fashion articles in the archive.

FRANZEN

Several articles? Good Lord. I was having a bad time at school. Those fashion pieces probably came out of a wish to antagonize.

INTERVIEWER

A bad time?

FRANZEN

I had bad dorm rooms, and I’d landed in a nerdy situation as a prospective physics major. There were very few cute girls, and those few had no interest in me. My only significant ambition was to get laid, and I was failing spectacularly at it, for reasons now obvious to me but completely invisible at the time. I thought about transferring to a different school, but then I realized that if I majored in German I could go to Europe for a year, and that things might be better there.

Things were not better there, at least not girlwise. But I came back to the States less outrageously immature. And every once in a while a person’s life feels like a novel, and the eight weeks in the middle of my last year of college were a time like that. Everything came together quickly, all the stuff that had been latent suddenly crystallized, and I felt transformed in the space of eight weeks. I became a human being. By the end of that January, I was having sex with the person I would end up married to for fourteen years, and I’d become a determined, focused writer who wanted to do nothing but write ambitious novels.

INTERVIEWER

What had happened?

FRANZEN

I wrote about it in The Discomfort Zone —my discovery, as Rilke puts it in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , that I had an interior life I’d previously known nothing about. It had to do with reading Rilke and Kafka and the other modern German prose writers, and it had to do with my brother Tom. It had to do with having been away from my family for so long — with coming back and suddenly being able to see them in the framework that the German moderns had given me. It had to do with falling in love.

INTERVIEWER

What about your brother?

FRANZEN

I was in deep emulation of Tom, who had begun as a still photographer and then moved into avant-garde film. I admired Tom’s equipment, as it were. Right before I’d gone to Germany, I’d worked for him as a laborer in Chicago and had made enough money to buy a little Olympus, the smallest SLR on the market, which I took to Europe and tried to do art photography with. I wanted to take odd pictures, especially ones of the industrial areas, again in emulation of Tom, who had an urban-industrial aesthetic.

But I always had an uneasy relationship with pictures. I could never figure out what I was trying to do with photography. Landscape photography in particular: Oh, it’s a pretty sunset. Oh, that’s a pretty rock formation. Who the fuck cares? I’d come to associate it with what I perceived as my mother’s obsession with appearances — her dictating what I wore to school, her constant fussing with the decoration of our house, her shame about having kids who were different from her friends’ kids, the general barrenness of worrying so much about surfaces. A persistent fantasy I had throughout my late teens and twenties was that I was being followed with a camera, and that people who hadn’t respected me enough, girls who hadn’t wanted me, would see where I was now and be impressed. It was an awful reverie, because I could feel, even as I was having it, that it was an inheritance of that obsession with surfaces.

In the spring of my junior year in Europe, Tom had come over and traveled with me, and when we were in Milan his movie camera was stolen. By the following Christmas, it was clear that he wasn’t going to get a new one. He’d given up filmmaking, and I now had the burden and the opportunity to be the family artist. And, specifically, to be a writer, given my disenchantment with images.

INTERVIEWER

Is that obsession with appearances still a concern to you?

FRANZEN

Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer. The craving for an audience, coupled with the shame of exposing yourself to it. This is stuff that I was always tormented by and have been working through as recently as in Freedom .

But I had all the clues I needed in Germany, in Nietzsche: “Everything that is deep loves the mask.” The Twenty-Seventh City is one big mask. And the long-term ambition for all my work has been to find better and better masks — to find the means to make visible and feelable the unsayable things inside me.

INTERVIEWER

How did you accomplish it?

FRANZEN

I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer. To write about what was really going on in me with respect to my parents, with respect to my wife, with respect to my sense of self, with respect to my masculinity — there was just no way I could bring that to the surface. I’d tried writing about it directly in short stories before I got going with The Twenty-Seventh City , and I just hadn’t had the chops to get at it, didn’t have enough distance on it, didn’t understand it well enough. So I put on the mask of a middle-aged postmodern writer.

Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very compromised sense of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to the brain — this was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had been drummed into me by my dad: “You are smarter than most people.” He felt himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me, many times, “Don’t make the mistake I made.” So I set a lot of store in being brainy. And satire was particularly appealing, because, first, it was funny, and I always liked to be funny, and, second, you didn’t have to take responsibility for generating your own faith, your own core beliefs. You could simply expose the mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way for the baby of his family — who’d been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male presences — to exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, no less important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. During those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been made sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. I’d seen firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put a woman in the hospital! So it’s really no wonder that intellect presented itself as a safer alternative in The Twenty-Seventh City .