{"id":76444,"date":"2014-09-11T11:00:50","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T15:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76444"},"modified":"2014-09-11T09:18:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T13:18:39","slug":"finding-the-question-that-hasnt-been-asked-an-interview-with-lynne-tillman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/11\/finding-the-question-that-hasnt-been-asked-an-interview-with-lynne-tillman\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding the Question That Hasn\u2019t Been Asked: An Interview with Lynne Tillman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"tumblr_n1if2z5p2b1r5d0xzo1_500\"<\/a>

Lynne Tillman, Second Avenue, New York City, 2013. Photograph: Mark Alice Durant.<\/p><\/div>\n

Writing a short introduction about Lynne Tillman isn\u2019t easy; her singular and visionary writing covers a great deal of territory. The author of twelve books, she is adept at fiction, short and long essays, cultural critique, and interviews. A sampling of just three of her books conveys the scope of her work: her novel <\/em>American Genius: A Comedy follows the obsessive inner monologue of a single character for almost three hundred pages; <\/em>This Is Not It is a compendium of twenty years of witty and risky novellas and short stories, some as short as a paragraph; and <\/em>Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. weaves together the voices of Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Paul Auster, Calvin Trillin, and many others to tell not just the story of the rise and fall of the iconic, well-loved Books & Co. but that of the changing landscape of publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Her new book, <\/em>What Would Lynne Tillman Do?<\/a>, is a collection of recent essays\u2014on Andy Warhol\u2019s <\/em>a: A Novel, on the lives and work of Paul and Jane Bowles, and on Edith Wharton and architecture, to name just a few\u2014and interviews with Harry Mathews, Paula Fox, Lebanese-American writer and visual artist Etel Adnan, and German painter Peter Dreher. Each piece, whether essay or interview, is illuminated by Tillman\u2019s wit, intellect, and curiosity. When the book was released earlier this year, Jason Diamond of <\/em>Flavorwire declared 2014 to be \u201cthe year of Lynne Tillman.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I spoke with Lynne Tillman at the New School, as part of the university\u2019s Summer Writers Colony. Fiction and nonfiction students had spent three days reading <\/em>What Would Lynne Tillman Do?\u00a0and the questions I posed reflected their curiosity, as well as my own, regarding the processes and practices that allow her to transition easily between genres. Tillman was eager to answer, and the qualities that characterize her writing shone through in her answers.<\/em><\/p>\n

In your 2009 essay, \u201cDoing Laps Without a Pool,\u201d you write, \u201cI don\u2019t want to take a position. Not taking a position is a position that acknowledges the inability to know with absolute surety, that says: Writing is like life, there are many ways of doing it, survival depends on flexibility. Anything can be on the page. What isn\u2019t there now?\u201d All those interesting negatives\u2014\u201cnot<\/em> taking a position,\u201d \u201cthe inability<\/em> to know,\u201d \u201cwhat isn\u2019t<\/em> there now\u201d\u2014reminded me of Keats\u2019s famous letter in which he used the term negative capability<\/em>. When you begin to build an essay, do you feel as if you\u2019re exploring what you don\u2019t know, precisely because<\/em> you don\u2019t know? Or do you begin with a firm idea or a mystery that you want to explore more deeply?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I begin nonfiction essays in a similar way to fiction. I have some questions in my mind, things that I\u2019m interested in writing about, and in fiction I find a voice through which to do that. On the other hand, in an essay, I assay some of what I think I know, and then, as I go along, I realize that I don\u2019t know what I thought I knew. I wrote \u201cDoing Laps Without a Pool\u201d because Rebecca Woolf was editing an anthology of work from Fence<\/em>, with commentaries by former and current editors\u2014I had been the fiction editor for fifteen issues. She was looking for essays that would somehow relate to our experience of the magazine. The reason Fence<\/em> has its title is that they didn\u2019t want to take an absolute position about what kind of writing they represented, and that appealed very much to me. I\u2019ve been criticized for that, too\u2014for being so involved and engaged with narrative. As if narrative were a simple thing. It was a hard essay to write because I wanted to address all those writers with whom I\u2019d had arguments about stories but had never found the words to respond adequately. There are no answers in \u201cDoing Laps Without a Pool,\u201d but I\u2019m saying that terms like experimental<\/em> or traditional<\/em> or mainstream<\/em> or conventional<\/em> are not resonant. They\u2019re not helpful to writers or to ways of thinking about writing. At least they\u2019re not helpful to me.<\/p>\n

When I write, I try to find my way through it. Whether it\u2019s an essay or a story, I don\u2019t really know where I\u2019m going. For example, in the essay \u201cPoint of View,\u201d I asked myself, Why is it that people have been so harsh about Diane Arbus over the years? But I didn\u2019t want to think about it in the ways it had been<\/em> thought about. Half the battle is asking a different question, finding the question that hasn\u2019t been asked. So in the case of Diane Arbus, I began to think about why it is that she\u2019s considered so explosive by some, and somewhat exploitative. I came up with this notion of a \u201cbenign-looking contract\u201d\u2014that perhaps we had somehow thought we could look at documentary photography without feeling complicit or voyeuristic. I asked myself a question that hasn\u2019t been answered or addressed yet. That\u2019s one way I approach writing\u2014going out on a limb with what is unsaid. In an essay, you have to take a position, finally, but you can also take many positions, and you can qualify those positions as well.<\/p>\n

You do that in your essay about the Rolling Stones. The piece starts out being about getting dressed in the morning, then it moves into hunger, and then the Stones\u2019 first concert in New York. And you have a great line about how \u201cno one clapped or shouted, everyone was fed up, pissed off, let down.\u201d Yet what you finally came away with was, \u201cLife continued but something had changed: the Rolling Stones had played New York.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I contributed that to an anthology called The Show I\u2019ll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience<\/em>. I had several shows in mind, but I didn\u2019t know anyone else who\u2019d been to that show, except for the friend with whom I\u2019d attended the concert, while I was still in college. She was older. I thought I\u2019d write about that because it remained so vivid. But I started it in that way to set up the kind of person I saw myself as then\u2014a person who would like the Rolling Stones much better than the Beatles. You know, a depressed, angry person.<\/p>\n

By the end, you come away with a sense of resolution\u2014it wasn\u2019t important how it unfolded, simply that the Stones had been here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it was so much a resolution. It was more like, here\u2019s this character\u2014and to me she\u2019s a character\u2014who starts out saying, Every day is the same. She just gets out of bed every day, but then something was different\u2014the Rolling Stones had played New York.<\/p>\n

Your essays on Paul and Jane Bowles seem to turn on an idea of Paul Bowles having been \u201cforever amused by something invisible buzzing around him, and that something kept him going. Maybe he was amused just to be alive.\u201d But I wouldn\u2019t say his stories and novels are about amusement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They\u2019re very dark.<\/p>\n

Is that what first drew you to his work\u2014those kinds of unflinching explorations of overwhelming underworlds?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What first drew me to his work was that he was an American abroad, and I was fascinated with that. I was living in Amsterdam, and everyone was talking about him and his work. After college, I had wanted to get out of America and lead what I thought was a writer\u2019s life. Paul and Jane Bowles were models. Gertrude Stein was a model. There was the idea that in order to write you had to leave home, and maybe become an expatriate or even an exile. And that was something I very much admired in him. And also that darkness in his writing, the strangeness.<\/p>\n

But people who write about dark things are not necessarily dark themselves. Bowles had a great sense of humor. Some of his autobiography, Without Stopping<\/em>, is really hilarious. So is his nonfiction book, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue<\/em>. He started out, in the thirties, as a composer, and he was sent by the Library of Congress to record Moroccan music\u2014those recordings are still in the Library of Congress\u2014and the book is about that trip. Absolutely wonderful essays about his travels in Morocco to record music that had never been recorded before. And that\u2019s, of course, a connection to the Rolling Stones, and what they heard and became interested in\u2014Joujouka music.<\/p>\n

You begin \u201cNothing Is Lost or Found,\u201d on the Bowleses, with a beautiful quote from Buber\u2014\u201cI once read \u2018All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.\u2019 The beginnings of journeys and narratives can be as surprising as their secret destinations.\u201d The part about destinations is certainly true of some of the characters in Bowles\u2019s stories and, less harrowingly of course, in your own essays. Is there some secret narrative destination that you\u2019d still like to arrive at, that you haven\u2019t yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a wonderful essay by Mary McCarthy called \u201cSettling the Colonel\u2019s Hash.\u201d Mary McCarthy was such a brilliant writer, and her nonfiction is nonpareil. In that essay she said something like, if there are no surprises for the writer, they\u2019ll be no surprises for the reader. I really think that\u2019s true. As you write, you\u2019re finding things out. Now that\u2019s a very hard thing to do, writing that way. Writing in any way is hard to do. But if you don\u2019t really know where you\u2019re going and you\u2019re trying to figure it out as you go along, it\u2019s not pleasant. It\u2019s not as though you wake up and say, Hey, let\u2019s go on a journey today. Let\u2019s find something. I\u2019m not that optimistic. I wish I were. But you\u2019re trying to figure out something, and that\u2019s why, going back to your very first question, I don\u2019t want to be proscriptive, because maybe there\u2019s a way for me to get somewhere that would be considered by some to be, you know, Oh, that\u2019s not the way people do it anymore. But maybe, in the moment of writing, that could very well be the way to do it.<\/p>\n

You wrote the introduction to Charles Henri Ford\u2019s diary, Water From a Bucket<\/em>, and you were his date for the Paul Bowles concert at Lincoln Center in 1995. But did you ever interview him?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I knew him a long time, and in some ways having any conversation with him was interviewing him. At one point he said to me, You\u2019re so good at interviewing, you\u2019re so good at asking me questions, why don\u2019t you write my autobiography? Or I could write it with you. And we\u2019ll do it by taping. I said, Okay, but who pays for the transcriber? And he said, You do! So the book never happened, because it was the mideighties, and I was making so little money, and there he was living in the Dakota, with a house he owned in Paris. It was crazy. He was fascinating and fun, but he was very cheap. It was astounding, in fact. He was late once to his own book party. It was snowing, and when he finally arrived, an hour late, he said that the bus had broken down and he had to wait for another bus. He wouldn\u2019t take a taxi to his own book party.<\/p>\n

And yet, reading his diary, his life was so fabulous\u2014hanging out with the Sitwells, Cocteau, Leonora Carrington, Gala and Salvador Dal\u00ed \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read his diary for the first time in the late seventies, and said to him, Oh, this is great, you should publish this. He sort of ignored me, but then I was a kid, really, unpublished\u2014no one important to him in that way. I read it again in the late eighties, and I said again, You really should publish this. He said he just wasn\u2019t interested. Then in the midnineties\u2014and by then he was probably in his mid- to late eighties\u2014I realized it was sort of now or never. I\u2019d always thought the diary was an incredible document, unique in the way that he\u2019d written it and in the way that it gave a sense of that period, of a certain life lived during that period, a life that would otherwise not be known. But he said, I\u2019m too involved in what I\u2019m doing now, and besides I don\u2019t live in the past. He was pretty incredible that way\u2014eighty-six and \u201cI don\u2019t live in the past.\u201d Finally I said that I was going to get it published for him.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a longer, sorrier story, but I got in touch with a publisher who said he\u2019d publish it, and then four years later nothing had happened. Even though, when I\u2019d sent it to him, I\u2019d said, Charles is eighty-six, and I want this to come out before he dies. There was also very much a feeling in me that you don\u2019t want to be forgotten when you\u2019re an older person. You want a younger writer to come along and say, Your work is still valid and I\u2019m going to get it published. So, on October 1, 2000, I went to his apartment in the Dakota, and saw that he was not doing well, and thought to myself, I said I was going to get this published, I made a commitment to him, and also to myself. So, determined to do it, I called the delinquent publisher the next day and wheedled it out of him that he wasn\u2019t going to do it. He mailed the manuscript back to me, and, luckily, it arrived, because it turned out to be the only extant copy. It wasn\u2019t even the original. I didn\u2019t know where the original was, and Charles didn\u2019t, either. Then I immediately got in touch with Jonathan Rabinowitz of Turtle Point Press, because I thought he\u2019d love this book. Jon told me he was going to a bar mitzvah on Saturday morning in the West Village\u2014not far from where I live\u2014and if I could get it to him he\u2019d read it over the weekend and let me know Monday morning. I did, and he called me that Monday and said, Let\u2019s do it. We had it out in eight months. And Charles lived another six or eight months after that, so he saw the book. The book party Jon planned had to be cancelled\u2014it had been set for September 13, 2001. Charles never had a party, but he had the book.<\/p>\n

I was so entranced by his diary that it distracted me from my preparations for my talk with you! His sensibility was so completely of a different time, and I felt that by reading this intimate document I was living that time through him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think what I love most about diaries is the presentation of a sensibility. Sensibilities actually shift in different times, and with a diary you can discern the sensibility of an individual who is an individual but also a product of his or her time and society. A diary represents that. It\u2019s a recording in the moment. Diaries are about private thoughts, secret feelings. It seems people don\u2019t believe in having secrets anymore. And that\u2019s a whole other idea then, and what does that mean? I think we\u2019re just beginning to deal with what that means.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Last Words Are Andy Warhol,\u201d your final lines are \u201cHow do we know what to pay attention to. How do we know for ourselves what\u2019s important. How do we choose. How do we know if it\u2019s art. How do we decide what to see and to read. How can we tell unless everything is there to see and read.\u201d These aren\u2019t posed as a series of questions, but as statements. You\u2019re not asking. You\u2019re saying that this is what\u2019s going on. I think it\u2019s difficult now for writers to maintain an individual vision with so much encroaching from all sides.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I might have an issue with the idea of an individual vision, because, for me, being a person is so shot through with everything else that I\u2019m not really sure we\u2019re in control of what constitutes our individual vision, certainly not entirely. The question that you\u2019re asking, though, is something we all wrestle with. How do I know what I think? How do I figure out what it is that I\u2019m thinking about? I know that thinking about thinking is what an essay helps me to do. I recently learned that Einstein would go into a room and would sit for something like three days\u2014I mean, I guess he would eat something every once in a while\u2014but he would just sit and think, and that\u2019s what his activity was. The activity of thinking<\/em>, without necessarily doing<\/em>, or without committing it to something, is an ideal that we could be doing more. We might think more, take time, rather than need everything to be instantaneous.<\/p>\n

But in our own lives, how do we get ourselves to think about how we think and why we think it? And then, of course, that\u2019s the place essays come from. And where all writing comes from.<\/p>\n

Sharon Mesmer is a poet and fiction writer. She is the author, most recently, of the poetry collections <\/em>Annoying Diabetic Bitch<\/a> and <\/em>The Virgin Formica<\/a> and the fiction collection Ma Vie \u00e0 Yonago: Illuminations<\/a>. She teaches at NYU and the New School.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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