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

FRANZEN

I could do ten sometimes.

INTERVIEWER

Even when things weren’t working?

FRANZEN

I didn’t have the experience of things not working. I didn’t know enough to know when something wasn’t all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.

INTERVIEWER

I’m struck by the number of dream sequences in The Twenty-Seventh City .

FRANZEN

More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming. John Gardner described novels as “vivid, continuous dreams,” and though I’m not sure Gardner ever wrote a particularly excellent novel, he was right about the notion of the dream. A notion reinforced by my feeling that all of Kafka’s fiction reads like transcribed dreams.

Most of the dreams in The Twenty-Seventh City were dreams I’d had myself. I wanted their uncanniness because I was trying to write an uncanny book. A book about making strange a familiar place. And the fastest route to uncanniness is to fall asleep and have a dream in which everything is at once familiar and strange. That was the feel I was after in that book: What kind of weird, surreal world have I fallen into here, in the most boring of Midwestern cities?

If the dreams are falling away in the later books, I’d like to think it’s because I’m getting better at making the book itself the dream. As I become more comfortable with accessing the primary psychic stuff inside me, and finding adequate dramatic vehicles for it, the need for the literal dream probably diminishes.

INTERVIEWER

How did you compose the book?

FRANZEN

I typed The Twenty-Seventh City on a Silver Reed typewriter. Then I set the book aside for nearly a year while I tried to find an agent. In hindsight, the responses of the top-drawer agents I’d sent it to seem remarkably gracious, although I didn’t experience them that way at the time. Gloria Loomis told me on the phone, with a little laugh, “I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the second— box .”

That’s when I did a translation of Spring Awakening , and I was working on some short stories again, with no more success than before. When I struck out with the agents, I called up the only writer I had any personal connection to, Hugh Nissenson, the novelist, and he proceeded to froth at the mouth for an hour about how stupid and corrupt the publishing industry was, and how lazy certain well-known writers were — it was somewhat embittered frothing. Then he asked me, “How long is the book?” And I told him, and he said, “I’m not going to read your book, but I can tell you right now it’s two times too long. You’ve got to go back and cut it by half.” Then he said, “Is there a lot of sex in it? There’s gotta be a lot of sex in it.”

It was a wonderful gift. I set down the phone and picked up the manuscript, which I hadn’t looked at in eight months, and I said, “My God, there’s two hundred pages that I can cut in half an hour.” I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before. That in fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, because I didn’t enjoy being punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I had to make the cuts to make it move.

INTERVIEWER

David Foster Wallace wrote to you in the summer of 1988, after reading The Twenty-Seventh City .

FRANZEN

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

When did you meet?

FRANZEN

I don’t think we succeeded in meeting until 1990. I was away in Europe for a year, and he flaked on our first two appointments to meet, for reasons that became clearer later. It’s a telltale sign of a substance problem when people don’t show up.

INTERVIEWER

Was this your first friendship with another writer?

FRANZEN

Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the same time, I also got to know Bill Vollmann, who was living in New York then.

INTERVIEWER

And what difference did this make?

FRANZEN

It’s all bound up in the story of my marriage, which I really would prefer not to get into here. But, briefly put, it was a very hermetic marriage, and simply to be in conversation with other people who I thought were doing good work — and also to get their take on my marital situation — was huge. Soon after that, I got to know David Means, too. So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you and Wallace corresponded about fiction less than people might expect.

FRANZEN

At a certain point, you get to be good enough friends that you pick up the phone rather than writing a letter. The letter-writing phase is sort of a “feeling out each other’s position” phase. I came into those conversations with a feeling of an unattractively extreme rage against literary theory and the politicization of academic English departments. It was related to my growing antagonism toward a status model of the novel — the idea that a novel’s highest achievement is to be read and studied by scholars. And yet my own attempts to connect with a larger audience had so far failed. Dave was very comfortable in the academy, but he himself was going through experiences that were making clear that there was more to life than producing interesting texts that a small number of very smart readers might engage with. His own life was in crisis, and he was coming into new material, his authentic personal material, and so he, too, welcomed a conversation about how to move beyond pure intellectual play into realms of, for want of a better word, emotional significance. The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached was the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance. The formulation had slightly different meanings for the two of us, but it was the bridge we eventually found to connect his view to my view.

INTERVIEWER

And the difference?

FRANZEN

I took the notion, finally, as a call to arms to continue trying to write books that ordinary people, nonprofessionals, could connect with. I think that Dave, up to the time when he stopped writing, was still struggling with his distrust of the part of himself that wanted to please people.

I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that our friendship was haunted by a competition between the writer who was pursuing art for art’s sake and the writer who was trying to be out in the world. The art-for-art’s-sake writer gets a certain kind of cult credibility, gets books written about his or her work, whereas the writer out in the world gets public attention and money. Like I say, I perceived this as a competition, but I don’t know for a fact that Dave perceived it that way. There’s some evidence that he did, but he was a troubled person and was tormented by the possibility of people misperceiving him. His instinct was to keep people at a distance and let the work speak for itself, and I do know that he enjoyed the status he’d attained. He might have denied it, but he denied all sorts of obviously true things at different moments. He came from an academic family, and the fact that lots of books were being written about his work really was gratifying to him. In the way that sibling competition works, I’ve consistently maintained a position of not caring about that stuff. And Dave’s level of purely linguistic achievement was turf that I knew better than to try to compete on.