Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Context of Other People

I think it’s pretty funny that over the last week I’ve read four quality Paris Review interviews — Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez — and of the four the writer whose prose stays closest to reality is Hunter Thompson.

The Garcia Marquez interview was interesting to me in two ways; first because it had cool tidbits about the man and his manner of writing and second when viewed in juxtaposition with the other interviews. For instance, one of my favorite throwaway quote from the Bradbury interview was a wonderful sex joke about short stories versus novels:  ”The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.” So naturally I thought it was really funny when today I read: “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph… At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.” Both are pretty good points — although Bradbury’s was much funnier — and they stand there diametric opposites. I’m not trying to say it’s weird that two great writers have completely different styles or approaches to writing, just that the proximity of my finding the two quotes is entertaining.

And yet, I think there are arguments that can be made to say Bradbury and Garcia Marquez are surprisingly similar writers despite the massive differences in cultural context. In the interview, the interviewer asks Garcia Marquez about the style he used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to convey the fantastic and natural. Apparently he got it from the stories that his grandmother used to tell him. “What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” And when I paused to think about it, maybe five minutes ago, I can say that Bradbury uses a similar brick-faced prose to describe the fantastic in his stories. Again I’m thinking of “The Veldt,” and oh, “The Happiness Machine” from Dandelion Wine. I just remembered a conversation with my mom from years ago, trying to decide if magical realism was a uniquely Latin American phenomenon; my first and best guess at a non-Latin novel in that style was Dandelion Wine. It’s time to reread that.

One last thing, one more quote. I like it because it does two things. Garcia Marquez is talking about his transition from journalism to fiction — though it wasn’t a full or permanent transition:

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”

First, the statement that Kafka showed Garcia Marquez that he was “allowed” to write things like that warms the cockles of my fucking heart. Writers like Garcia Marquez did the exact same thing for me, and it feels wonderful when titans are shown to only be so big when viewed at the right angles.

Second, In One Hundred Years and even more so in Autumn of the Patriarch Garcia Marquez plays around with time, turning around to tell stories concurrent with ones we just read, jumping forward to name a future that he has yet to build to, and so on and so forth. The quote does this too. It starts as a man in 1981 remembering his first experience with Kafka, when he was twenty years younger. But the way that he phrases the last sentence of the quote sounds like it comes directly from the man in his twenties — the man in 1981 did start writing a long time ago, the phrase would be “a much longer time ago” or something similar. Of course it could just be a translation mistake, which would be much less entertaining.

Hunter Thompson Was Never Really That Old

The Paris Review interview with Hunter Thompson.

A friend of mine once told me that my brother and I were the only people she knew who dropped the “S.” from Hunter Thompson’s name. I don’t really know why I do that. I’ve caught myself referring to him simply as “Hunter” once or twice recently and I feel like a douche whenever I do it.

Anyway, the interview: While I am, again, having fun reading these interviews, I still haven’t gotten as much out of one as I did from the Bradbury interview. Like I said about the Vonnegut, it might have something to do with how familiar I am with the writer before the interview. While I love Bradbury’s writing, I really didn’t know much about him as a person; Vonnegut’s nonfiction is intensely personal, and I know more about Hunter Thompson than any other writer I can think of. I’ve read tons of his letters, the majority of his published output (maybe only 55%, but still a majority — the man wrote a ton.) So I didn’t get too much new information from the interview. I do wonder if that was because it took place in 2000 — Thompson didn’t have the final straws of September 11th and the Bush reelection that finally broke his spirit, but he was slowing down, it felt. He recites his beginnings in Louisville and Eglin AFB, and I use the word recite here specifically.

The most entertaining part of the interview, for me, was about his love of deadlines. He loved the push at the end, and it makes sense when you consider that his first “gonzo” work, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” was a lead followed by pages torn out of his notebooks, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas falls apart into transcripts from his tape recorder at one point. He tells a story about writing a eulogy for Allen Ginsberg that Johnny Depp read for him at the funeral; he got it to Depp a half hour before Depp was due on stage, and most of it’s insults and fabrication. It’s quite tender. Too long to reproduce verbatim, but if you click the link it’s about 3/4 of the way down the page. Definitely worth it.

Two quotes:

On writers who say they can’t work drunk or high: “They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, “Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

On the writing process:

Interviewer: “Are there any mnemonic devices that get you going once a deadline is upon you—sharpening pencils, music that you put on, a special place to sit?”

Thompson: “Bestiality films.”

Interviews with Old Men

I’ve been having fun reading “Art of Fiction” interviews from the Paris Review. Two days ago I started with Ray Bradbury, because of course I’ve been all about him in the week following his death. The man just seemed so happy, and a large portion of the interview was conducted in 2010, after his stroke and the death of his wife, at age 89. Anyone who can still be that genuinely happy at that age after those events is someone who deserves a bit or a lot of your respect. My favorite quote, about why he tends to write short stories instead of novels: “ The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.”

Bradbury also apparently didn’t like Vonnegut — it was mutual — and this honestly surprised to me. “I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems.” He didn’t elaborate too much on it, but I got the impression that he is dismissive of Vonnegut because of his general darkness the same way that Bradbury has apparently gotten shit for being overly optimistic. The funny part is I think that Bradbury can be just as dark as Vonnegut — ever read “The Veldt,” from The Illustrated Man? — and Vonnegut has flashes of incredible happiness mixed in with his horribly, horribly sad writing.

So what do I do? I go ahead and read Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview. (I think that sentence was based on a joke from the movie High Fidelity. Remember when he sleeps with Marie de Salle?) Bradbury did have a point when he said Vonnegut has terrible problems, but hearing him — reading him, rather — his sadness is so flat, and he accepts it so effortlessly, that it can also come off as dispassion. The first chunk of the interview is about his WWII experiences, which I’m relatively familiar with through Slaughterhouse V and various things he’s written about the book. I might not have been quite as impressed with the interview because I’m more familiar with Vonnegut outside of his books than Bradbury, but there were still some gems in there I’d like to share.

On his theory of writing: “It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’”

On literature today being less pervasive than in previous eras: “There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass or readers. I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”

On love in stories and novels: “I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

On Slaughterhouse Vbeing considered obscene: “My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene. I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse Five?”

On that note, I’m done for the day. Next up: Pablo Neruda and his translator W.S. Merwin in two separate interviews. Oh, and Hunter Thompson, of course.

I Read The Fountainhead

Finally, finally, I’m done with it. Interestingly enough, I read it for pretty much the same reason I read The Hunger Games: I didn’t have a book, it was free, and I get seriously irked when people knock shit they haven’t tried. The difference, as it turns out, it that Hunger Games had some redeeming qualities. It wasn’t the best thing in the world, but it kept me entertained, so it did its job. The Fountainhead was a different story.

At first I was pleasantly surprised: Ayn Rand is a much better prose stylist than I expected, although she does have a somewhat irritating tendency toward the over-said. She also has the balls to make her plot gigantic, spanning many years of the same characters lives (Kavalier and Klay does that, too, now that I think about it) and involving a lot of totally unreasonable things made sort of believable. But the characters, god I hated them all so much. Of course, I’ve read books in which I hated the characters before and I liked them considerably more than this one. Pretty much anything by Charles Bukowski, for example.

At first I thought it was because at least Bukowski’s awful characters never tried to teach me anything, but after an initial encounter with a college president, Rand’s characters didn’t lecture at me for a few hundred pages — although it came back with a vengeance in the last hundred. So it couldn’t have only been that. Turns out, I think, I hated these characters not only because of their particular flaws but for a deep flaw in the writing itself, one that I don’t believe could have been taken out of the book without literally rewriting the entire thing.

Rand writes characters that she sees as entirely righteous (there are maybe one and a half of these characters) or entirely reprehensible. By definition this creates flat characters, which is the best way to describe the boring, boring characters in The Fountainhead. Pretty much everything Rand did in the book was based on the idea of a black and white world, despite the fact that the gray area is where all the really interesting shit goes down. She also had the irritating habit of attaching to any character that displays altruism, her supreme evil, a whole host of more reasonable weaknesses, like dishonesty, greed, lust for power, etc. Because apparently all of these ills are branches of altruism?

The strangest part of the last hundred pages (no spoilers, don’t worry) is that throughout the pontificating she would make really good arguments for self-actualization and then destroy any piece of credibility I might have given her by saying that any desire to do well by other people is antithetical to self-actualization. It was incredibly frustrating. The last hundred pages too me as long to read as the first 400, which is definitely a bad sign. But hey, now I’ve read Ayn Rand and I feel no compulsion to read anything else by her. And Ayn Rand hates compulsion.