Interview with Joseph McElroy

Author(s): Thomas LeClair and Joseph McElroy

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring, 1979), pp. 84-95
Published by: Chicago Review
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 Thomas LeClair

Interview with Joseph McElroy

Thomas LeClair: Could you say a bit about your working habits?

Joseph McElroy: Oh, I would be delighted to. I really would. I steal

paper and pens and that gives my imagination a more disembodied
feeling. My materials are like my time. I have stolen paper from the
university where I have worked, from stationery stores in New
York, Boston, New Hampshire. I write in long-hand and type early
drafts on yellow paper. Yellow paper with black type is pretty vivid,
it seems to me. I have stolen pens from real estate agents, insurance

agents, banks, friends, children, and my daughter Hanna. As for

working, I admire E. B. White's saying that the first thing he did was
to have a martini in order to work up courage to write because I have
often felt writers?various august American writers who will be
nameless here?who would say things like "I never write after I've
had a drink" were being a little bit too austere and pure. I write at
almost any time of day or night. I prefer to write in the morning
because I think my head is a little bit clearer. I feel, although it is
probably not true, that my time is heavily fragmented and broken
into, and therefore I like to think that Imust be able to write in any
odd fifteen minute period. So theoretically I am a disciplined worker
but my discipline might ask to be interrupted; then I will have to
work in odd little bits of time, almost anytime.

TLeC: You seem at ease handling scientific materials. Can you say
why and why so many novelists are not?

JMcE: There is a resistance to technology as being the instrument of

our destruction, an activity which is fundamentally dangerous. I
would agree with Doris Lessing's vision of the planet exterminating

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 itself in The Four-Gated City and with Peter Matthiessen in Far
Tortuga. But it also seems to me that many writers don't let them
selves take science and technology seriously because they see these
areas conflicting with the human imagination. They see science as
anti-human. I don't. Science and technology offer forms by which
we can see some things clearly; their experimental and measuring
methods, their patterns larger than life or smaller than sight, beckon
us out of ourselves. If you assume your assumptions are only one of
many possible views, maybe one day you find a way to drop, say,
the reassuring habit of scale models and conceive distorted models,
a model you can visualize only in fragments that the mind must leap
to unite.

TLeC: Could you reconstruct some of the reasons why you decided
quite early that you did not want to write what you have called the
"sensitive American novel"?

JMcE: I think I said in "Neural Neighborhoods" that I came to a

point of confidence or ego at which I decided that some of the near
chaoses of my dreams and the turning consciousness in some of my
sentences weren't wrong, weren't bad, might be extreme but had to
get free play, room to jump, to wander, to sweep. My short story
"The Accident" is a last effort to write a packaged, settled sort of
well-behaved fiction. It wasn't me. I guess I side with the Hamsun of
Mysteries, the C?line of Journey; I don't mean their politics but their
will to bust loose in order to hold fast to a self that might get lost in
blandness and closet imitation, though with C?line, who at times
seems to become the age, an open secret from himself is that he's
afraid to give equal time to all the love and strength you can't help
knowing he's seen in people. To go on?single books: Stendhal's
Charterhouse; Gogol; Mailer when all his stars are out, which isn't
often enough; Kleist's Kohlhaas; Miller's Colossus of Maroussi, a
moral book; Grass's Dog Years, history as the obsessed, uninhibited
voice flowing out of broken memory. That's one side of me. That
says no to, partly, that conditioned response built into the sober
pluperfect and past tense sound of sensitive objectivity that comes
out like soap-opera?though God knows Robbe-Grillet can be
pompous enough even in Jealousy, a fine book that represents I
guess a desire that's another side of me, to turn microscopic seeing
into meditation?to be truthfully precise. But to what and through
what? I'm sick of this dogma, a platitude supporting the virtue of
concreteness without ever asking why concreteness, what
philosophical conclusions does it rest on?

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TLeC: After your four realistic novels, Plus could be read as a sport,
but it seems to me to be a kind of coda to your work.

JMcE: Someone said to me he thought itwas a funny book; I guess I

was pleased to hear that, because it seems to me a somber and rather
threatening book. I saw Plus as a more personal extension of
technological and scientific themes in Lookout Cartridge and in the
slightly kitsch preoccupations of the main character inAncient His
tory. I also saw in Plus the good old theme of reintegrating the body
and the soul, a dynamic drama of growth, unexpected growth. That
was very important to me because the more I write the more I feel
that books can't be researched. The important experiences that you
write about have to ambush you. Suddenly you wake up one morn
ing and you see that something has happened to you. You have been
writing prose all your life, and now you have lived through some
thing. So I wanted the growth theme inPlus to involve an unexpect
edness which was somehow related to the collaboration process in
which it is partly the solar energy experiment and partly some mys
terious, residual will in the main character and in the universe,
which Imp Plus ties into, that cause the growth. The process, you
know, is worked out exactly if the reader wants to find it, to follow
electromagnetic cascade and the rest to that void point of converging
causalities. I wanted to create something tragic but beyond tragedy,
a space idyll in which the body and the mind are reintegrated into a
whole, organic substance. Although I don't think oiPlus as science
fiction, except insofar as science might mean knowing, I did want to
use scientific materials which seem to me to be modern and not to be
as easily dismissable as liberal intellectuals like to dismiss the space
program, to use these materials as means of insight?but in a way
that was more private, more personal, more intense. I also set out to
write a book of 150 pages partly because I had been goading myself
and partly because so many people have said, "You are a long book
writer; you couldn't write a short book."

TLeC: Did you have to research brain anatomy for the writing of
Plus?

JMcE: I did do some reading but Iwas more interested in some kind
of transcendent anatomy which never claims that the anatomy you
can find in books is not true but moves beyond that physical
anatomy to some of the possibilities which are associated with our
word "mind." If mind emerges from brain, it certainly is also true
that mind changes brain. Mind can actually change the physical
thing that we call brain. I also feel that there is something not

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 individual?more collaborative?called "will" which arises from the
anatomy of our zoological self but which transcends it, and I was
trying to find a dramatic image of some life force in Plus that to me
would be more important than any amount of dissective neuro
anatomy that could be done on the brain. What I had in mind was a
more transcendent, visionary, even simple book. While the book
arises out of materials that are scientifically observable, it is more
inclined toward the visionary or the religious.

TLeC: Some of the earlier books, Hind's Kidnap for example, are
very tightly structured and seem to be researched. Has your method
of composition changed as you have gone along?

JMcE: Everything in the forms and rhythms that I feel in my narra

tives could be seen to bear upon organism, the growth of organism.
Hind's Kidnap, which I like for its traditional mythic narrative force
but which I grant is the most artificial of my books, is a contrast in
formalities. On the one hand, the mass of material that is gathered
into the book is rigidly organized into three parts, the first and third
being mirror images of each other. On the other hand, the titles of
the three sections suggest that each section is part of an independent
sequence which is going on. The novel is rigidly formal about
something which can be only partially known, so the independent
parts are seen also as parts of systems which no doubt interpenetrate
but you can only have intuitions of this.
The method which has remained constant is the writing of the
individual sentence, and I increasingly feel that I want the sentence
to be a paradigm of everything. I see myself as writing one sentence,
then writing another sentence, but the rest of the method, if one can
even use the word method, has been staggering, haphazard, infor
mal, dishonest, painstaking, and it has necessarily involved infor
mation. I use the word information as a big word in the twentieth
century. We collect information. I feel sometimes like the character
in The Golden Notebook, Anna, who feels herself a center being
besieged by information from all corners. I have needed information
for my books, and sometimes the information has been in my head
and sometimes it has not, so I have gone out and studied up to
acquire information to fill a gap. I have done various things to make
this less reprehensible because it does violate a principle of mine,
which is that any book you write should be something that you could
write just by writing in a bare room without books?just a table and a
chair. But I violate that. One of the ways in which I have made this
research or search process less reprehensible is by associating my
ignorance with the ignorance or neophyte status of the character, as

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I believe I do in Lookout Cartridge. I feel that Cartwright's informa
tion about cinematography and so forth can be acceptable to the
reader because Cartwright is not a professional. He has suddenly
found himself involved in a plot that has to do with film-making, and
he has had to acquire a lot of information fast. You add that to the
fact that his temperament is sometimes a rather excessive collector's
temperament, and you have the beginnings of my attempt to excuse
my need to acquire further information in order to elaborate and
work out my fundamental conceit in the book.

TLeC: What was that fundamental conceit in Lookout Cartridge?

JMcE: Knowing is Not-Knowing. I knew that I wanted to write a

story about a sense of being between, of being caught between what
is known too well and what is known too little, about being caught
between wanting to be free, independent, and wanting to be secure,
protective. I had had, years before, a dream of being a lookout at a
construction site where there was something valuable in which a
band of people of whom Iwas a member were interested. They were
involved in some kind of theft?that was all that the dream told me. I
was the lookout and increasingly in the dream I felt in between those
I am looking out for and those I am looking out against. That was
one main source oi Lookout Cartridge. I knew also that I wanted to
write a story about a film that had been stolen and possibly de
stroyed and I didn't really have any more than that to go on.

TLeC: You knew you wanted to get the sense of between. You know
it is going to be a "mystery-thriller," as you have described it.What
is the next step in the elaboration of the conceit? How, for example,
did you choose Stonehenge as a setting?

JMcE: Stonehenge was for me certainly a place for reunion in the

deepest sense of the word. I think at some point David Brooke inA
Smuggler's Bible is called a reuniac. I suppose this is not a very
graceful word-image of the novelist's bringing a bunch of characters
together like Fellini?picking them from here, here, here, bringing
them all together and making them work coherently into a scene. So
my imagination might naturally turn toward a place that would draw
together a variety of people. Stonehenge also fitted into my plans as
a place around which many hypotheses circulated for generations. It
is a place associated with hokum, but it is also a very real place
where you can feel deeply about the past and about the mystery of
how much people knew about their universe a thousand, two
thousand years ago. Its association with measurements and obser

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vation, what we might loosely call science, was inseparable from
religion. So increasingly Stonehenge seemed to me to be a natural
setting for some crisis event to occur in my story.

TLeC: What is the next step in connecting materials?

JMcE: faith in a multiplicity

I have of connections that any one
magnetic point in the book will have. I have suggested some pos
sibilitiesStonehenge seemed to me to have. One can see Lookout
Cartridge as a linear movement closer and closer toward some an
swer to the question "What happened to the film?" But you can also
see the book as a rhythm of gatherings together and dispersions. I
am using this even more in Women and Men. I have become par
ticularly interested in the work on coincidence of the Austrian
biologist Paul Kammerer. He argues that there is a force in the
universe parallel to, not excluding but parallel to, causality which is
like what we might call coincidence or convergence. The events of
Lookout Cartridge are not only linear but also a collection of disper
sions toward what you might call disorder or provisional transition
and magnetic nodes or points at which everything comes together.

TLeC: The elaboration or composition seems to move by analogue.

JMcE: What I have wanted to do is transcend metaphor and work

toward homology. I suppose partly because I like to think of my
books as being true rather than literary in some artificial sense. And
I think that my books, up through Lookout Cartridge anyway, tried
in a sane more than a paranoid way to create a collaborative network

which human experience is. We can never know enough in order

totally to understand it, but it is there as some kind of mysterious
network. Maybe it is the image of God in the world. In the process of
understanding the network, one sees innumerable correspondences,
and these yield what we may call metaphor. Sexual relations be
tween two people may be like telepathy. But always I wanted to
make these comparisions, these analogies, these metaphors have a
stronger status so that my books would not seem to be literary
artifices but would seem to be pretty desperate, sober explorations
into what the larger network of the world really is.

TLeC: How does this notion of network affect the relation of cause
and effect that moves most fiction forward?

JMcE: I find in myself a wish to get to one side of or pass beyond

sequential cause and effect. That's why I find David Hume's de

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struction of cause and effect assumptions entrancing, though he
knows it's only theoretical. It supports a fiction writer's just showing
events and not ascribing causes. A Smuggler's Bible has a temporal
sequence and many histories through it, but formally it is to be seen
also as a m?ndala or some other spatial form in which the eight
chapters have a kind of equality outside of time. In Ancient History
the narrator is increasingly overcome by thinking in twos?in
dichotomies?and he wants to get beyond this, not by moving
through some dialectic to a synthesis, but to some stasis which I
associate with a physical field in which everything is at rest. Differ
ent entities in a field would have hierarchical relations because they
would be at different distances which could be measured, but they
would also be distributed in such a way that they are all equal.
My Cartwright finds himself in such a position at the end of
Lookout Cartridge. He is alone at a center which is one of many
centers. He has moved through his story knowing things which have
to be partly why he moves and acts, but the more important causes
are not behind but ahead of him, pulling him on, the action con
stantly reinventing, restating its track, which makes him seem more
free at the same time that his power is that he knows better than
anyone else in the book how much he's a mere part of a necessity
partly seen. He's in the open, at the end, wonderfully free within the
opening field. Sounds dumb, eh?

TLeC: Do your suspicions about causality influence your conception

of character and psychology?

JMcE: I guess I am interested in the present and the future and in

action more than I am in its cause. I am interested in seeing as
closely as I can see, and I find that the most I can do is to look at the
phenomena or the scene in which people move. Psychological ex
planations of why some of my characters behave as they do can be
easily deduced. It is just that I have not been especially interested in
that, perhaps because the analysis of those chains and linkages has
been done and done and done over and over again. That may be one
reason why I am drawn to Casta?eda where the emphasis is upon
finding some initiative or entry into action in which the inner
dialogue is stopped and the inhibiting or distracting past is cast be
hind. Perhaps there is some anarchic romanticism in me that wants
to break free of any psychological analysis or explanations which
could be given for a person being as that person is.

TLeC: You have spoken about fiction in spatial terms. Have you
been influenced by visual art or by film?

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JMcE: Not in any ways that would interest you. I toy with trying to
see a view two-dimensionally as if my eyes couldn't distinguish
distances. I'm attracted to navigators' maneuvering board plots of
relative motion and to wind-vector diagrams?time or force seen in a
spatial model. Painting is madly sexy. Visual arts? Blow-up color
photos of marine life, what's going on on a coral reef, orange zoan
thids, animals like plants. Film? I'm encircled by a wall of film; I'm
audience and projector.

TLeC: You once wrote about the "wonder and awe" the Apollo
spacemen experienced. Would those two reactions be an appro
priate aesthetic aim?

JMcE: I think at various points in Lookout Cartridge I presumed to

effect something like that, and then this flickered out of my mind.
There was a time when I thought of Lookout Cartridge as being a
computer in itself. And I thought, that is grandiose and I couldn't
honestly defend it. But I think I do at times rather grandiosely im
agine a book as a human-made system that through elaborate,
labyrinthine intricacy can bring us to a threshold of ravishment and
wonder. To do everything I can do ambushing, analyzing, cracking
open, acting, tracking, forcing?to be at last surprised, rewarded by
the truth being not exactly earned by me but from a totally unknown
and unexpected direction given to me. But the elements of it, you
see, are all with me already; I'm carrying the message, I'm in pos
session of it, but I don't know it all until I'm given its meaning.

TLeC: Who are some writers working now whom you have affinities
with or admire?

JMcE: During the 1960s itwas Nabokov more than any other who I
felt was on the right track, and then increasingly I felt that he
shouldn't be any different from what he was?generous of me?but I
should be different from him. Now I have gone back to reading Doris
Lessing, whom I was unable to read when I tried in the '60s, and I
feel that she has a tremendous amount to say in spite of a style that I
used to find an impediment. Names at random: Calvino, Invisible
Cities (story beyond story into meditative plane); t zero, science
without jokey undercutting; Butor, Passing Time, and Degrees,
which I've said too much about in "Neural Neighborhoods";
Harold Brodkey in his search for an absolutely right and natural
language; Cormac McCarthy, who published a book called The Or
chard Keeper in 1966 which I thought a very powerful work of
American landscape, menace, and love. He is a writer I still look for

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great things from. I haven't read too much of Walter Abish, but his
way of playing with the given energies of language so that language
seems to be playing with the writer's mind has a gaiety and an
independence; his is certainly one direction that I think literary art
can take.
I read a lot of poetry. I admire Ammons for his beautiful recon
noitering into the structure and form of natural things. I love Kin
nell's Nightmares, Levertov's touch where nature and person meet,
Snyder's domestic poems, Ashbery's rhetoric as a unique image of
the mind living its changes. While I try to keep up with writers like
Updike or Iris Murdoch, the reading that matters most to me is in
nonfiction and often philosophy, Eugene Marais's books on baboons
and termites. He was an amazing, versatile, tragic man. I've been
writing a play, quite an extravaganza, about him for three years.
Philosophy I read because I am looking for visions and statements
that have an unusual clarity, a clarity perhaps not so swarming with
business and dread as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which I ad
mire, or Gaddis's The Recognitions, an older, less well-written book
I admire much more. I have gone back to read Schopenhauer and
Hume whom I admire immensely. Hume would be on my list of six
dead dinner guests. (That sounds like a poisoning.) I read and re
read Nietzsche, and since my present book, Women and Men, turns
upon economics in various forms I've re-read Marx, Keynes,
Schumacher's beautiful book, and Thorstein Veblen, who seems to
me to have more to say about the relations between women and men
than a lot of women have. In a different way the Buddhists and
Ruskin tell me more about goods and services than all the rest of the
economists put together. What about Keynes as a difficult fiction
writer? Much as I admire the stories of all kinds of people from
Eudora Welty back to Hemingway, from Isaac Babel to Flannery
O'Connor, there is something about the crystallized definition in the
work of many philosophers that appeals to me. Even when the
philosophers' hypothetical visions of truth are shaky and subjective
and open to criticism, heavy criticism as in the case of Nietzsche and
our moral, mystic, magic tourist Casta?eda, I often find more inspi
ration from them than big books like my old love U.S.A.; Gaddis's
J.R.; a better big book, Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective; or
a smaller, finer, but safer fantasy, Cheever's Bullet Park.
I also want to mention William Wilson, who has published a
collection of stories entitled Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka.
This is a man whose knowledge of philosophy and whose insight into
science and the visual arts are enormous and whose mind is bewil
deringly brilliant. Of all the people I have known over the last ten
years, I would have to single him out first as an influence. He felt

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there was some distinctive strain in my notion of correspondences
and phenomenal forms making up a network which was a field, and
he encouraged me to have confidence in the rather haphazard intu
itions that I had.

TLeC: How do you get away with the abstractions you use in your
fiction?

JMcE: By tying them as closely, even at times fanatically, as I can to

phenomena, which is what I believe I do. Which abstractions were
you thinking of?

TLeC: The talk inAncient History, the language at the beginning of

Plus.

JMcE: I like books that try to push the reader into a strange state of
mind in which everything has to be relearned. I like William Gold
ing's The Inheritors for that reason. The language of Plus, especially
at the beginning, is that of a consciousness that is discovering the
world all over again. I set out to take everything away from a person
and write a drama in which that person would begin with some
essence which could not be taken away and rediscover the world
and reconstruct the self. I do not like to speak of novels as being
about language or even in a sense made of language because it seems
to me language always has to somehow refer to a shared world. That
is why I can admire the work of Dreiser and of Doris Lessing. Still,
Plus is an exploration or experiment in language, where I am moving
more toward Beckett than toward Joyce, trying to establish a mini
mal language upon which one might build.

TLeC: Can we talk about Plus or must we talk in the language of

Plus?

JMcE: That is in some ways a flattering question because you

suggest that there is something very distinctive about the vision and
language in the novel. But what I resist in your comment is the
notion that a work of art that is moving and has been felt and under
stood might be so strange that you couldn't talk about it. I can't
think of any book I have ever read that I liked and knew anything
about that I wouldn't enjoy talking to somebody else about who had
read it also. This doesn't mean that I can make an adequate verbal
image of it, but I can talk about it. The problem is that whatever
point of departure you choose in talking about the book, you have
violated your own secret whole sense of it.

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TLeC: As you say, a great deal is taken away inPlus. But it seems to
me that the more common tendency in your work is overload, giving
the reader more than he can possibly process . . .

JMcE: . . . because I want the reader to say, "You have offended

me, you have wearied me, you have made me mad as hell because I
spent ten bucks on your book, but I still love you." OK, that might
be underneath it all, but I think we live in a world in which we are
overloaded by information if we pay any attention at all. Just as I
wanted to introduce a strain of chaos into A Smuggler's Bible and
into Hind's Kidnap, in Lookout Cartridge there is in the sentences
and in the information a vast amount of overload to give the reader a
sense of teetering on the edge of not understanding. At the same
time, he is tantalized by the sense that the information is all here if
he just knew how to understand it.

TLeC: Does your giving the reader more than he wants remind him
of how little he knows or can know?

JMcE: That question hurts, but I think the answer is yes. I hoped to
create ambiguities from excess?the need to know yet to have at
hand too much?in order to have at least a chance of finding the key
to it all. I knew that Iwas asking too much of the reader sometimes,
but I persisted in doing it. If I had it to do over again, I would ease
some of the identifications inHind's Kidnap. Although I think that
Updike hasn't been as adventurous as a person of his enormous gifts
should have been, his notion of a compact with the reader is fair
enough. I think he goes too far; I think I don't go far enough in that
direction; I hope that I am writing for readers who would be willing
to commit themselves to a strenuous, adventurous fiction, but I
don't write fiction of deliberate difficulty. What I believe I am doing
is being, possibly in some new way I'm not sure about, a realist. In
the collaboration between the syntax of my sentences and the ob
servation of phenomena that is contained in my sentences, I think
that I am being faithful as much as I can be to the world that I find
with my senses and feel in the forms that are my mind. I have a
choice between going on as I have been or leavening and loosening
and to some extent dissolving the surface obstacles that a reader
finds reading me. I am trying to write easier prose because I don't
think people have time for long books and I am not even sure the
human race has a great deal of time. So I want to write easier prose,
but what comes out continues to be a sentence which is packed and
convoluted.
I'd also like to think the overload of information is partly an act

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of giving and the obsessive attention which the writer seems to pay
to the world is not paranoid or defensive primarily but appetitive, an
attempt to say here it is to be loved and to be received. When I first
started writing, I saw myself being divided between a cornball and
an iceberg. I think now I am much more of a cornball than I am an
iceberg, so I am dismayed by people calling my books cold. I grant
there is a cerebral, analytic, even sometimes manipulative strain in
my work, but I see this as subordinate to the emotional, the impul
sive and up-rushing. I see the books as emotional, almost too much
so. I thought Plus almost got out of control. I see Plus also as a step
beyond the despair and overload in Lookout Cartridge. And Women
and Men, which is number six, is my re-entry; my coming back to
the world and attempting to understand relations between men and
women, women and men, in a way that will answer more honestly
and fully questions which I only groped at before.

TLeC: Are these questions close to being answered now?

JMcE: Not yet. In most of my books I knew where I was going to

arrive at the end, but I didn't know how I was going to get there.
With Women and Men I know how I am going to get to the end, but I
don't know what is going to be there. That sounds clever, but it is
true. All I know is that at the end I am going to look over the rest of
the book and somehow use that as a means of defining a relation
between a man and a woman that will be both ideal and possible.
There are a lot of images in the book, but the main image which I
keep coming back to and which carries us from New York to New
Mexico, from New York to disarmament conferences, from Skylab
in orbit all the way down into the depths of the earth, is the image of
a man and a woman facing each other but not on the same line, as if
they were on parallel lines, as if they were looking over each other's
shoulders. So they are looking toward each other, but they are not
seeing each other. And if the book were to be described in abstract
or structural terms, the narrative turns again and again upon varia
tions of this image, variations which can be abstractly seen as all the
varieties of pivoting that are possible. If you see the man and woman
as two arrows pointing toward each other but on separate tracks,
and pivot one arrow or pivot them both, pivot them in various ways,
that is an abstract way of seeing all of the varieties of contact, of
communication, of insight that may be possible. The book is about
intuitions that may be possible between men and women if they live
together and know each other. These can be destructive and can
threaten separation, people knowing each other too well. But be
cause I am an optimist, they are also potentially a secret means of
living together.

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