KENNEDY: Yes, writing can be as spiritual as any religion you can name. In certain moments of creation, you are taken out of yourself and become a part of a larger world. Ideas, knowledge, scenes come into you and flow onto the paper. An hour or a day might pass and you at last awake as if from a trance and in front of you is a pile of paper and words are on those sheets of paper that you had no idea you were going to say. It is as I said, as if you have been in communion with some force much larger than yourself.
BRENNA: Where does the knowledge come from? Do you believe in Jung's theory of archetypes? Is it Yeats's Anima Mundi?
KENNEDY: The world spirit? Maybe it is. I don't know. I only know that when it happens it is a spiritual experience. If it's a genetic connection with an archetype, or you've submerged yourself in Yeats' river of creativity encircling the world, no one can say, but I don't know any writer who hasn't experienced it.
BRENNA: It's like the marathoner's high, the hormones kicking in and away you go.
KENNEDY: Maybe so. I'm not a runner, so I don't know what that feels like.
BRENNA: You've said that American writers are generous to each other, and you named the recently deceased Andre Dubus as one who was especially helpful to you. Could you expand on that a bit?
KENNEDY: I'm thinking of Duff Brenna, Jack Myers, W.D. Wetherell, Gordon Weaver, Susan Dodd, Gladys Swan, Andre Dubus, and many, many other writers, all of them reaching out to one another with advice, encouragement, recommendations. I have not seen the same colleagiality in Europe that I've seen in the United States. I think that American writers on the whole are more generous and giving to one another because they know first hand how hard the writing life can be, what a struggle it is to make your voice heard. We have to care about one another and help one another because if we don't, who will? No one much cares if the writer writes or not. If you quit or I quit, very few people would lose any sleep over it. Andre Dubus had a powerful affect on me as a writer. He literally influenced not merely my writing style but my life. It was Andre who gave me the kind of nourishment that most beginning writers are starving for. He praised my early work, tried to get some of it published, got me my first agent, and gave me over one-hundred and forty pages of notes to work with when I was working on my study of him, Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction. It was published in 1988. It was my first hardcover book. But this question of quitting. Andre said that writers quit for any number of reasons: They quit because their parents don't understand what the fuck they're doing and why they don't go out and get a real job. They quit because their friends don't understand what they are doing either. They quit because no one cares enough about what they are doing to give them encouragement. They can't get published. They work like hell and of course don't get money for it. And if you finally do publish in some lovely little magazine like Tendril or Ploughshares and you call your mother or father or friends and tell them, they say, "What's that?"
BRENNA: If it's not The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly you can't be for real.
KENNEDY: Exactly.
BRENNA: Dubus had his share of rejection too.
KENNEDY: No doubt about it. Andre Dubus knew and cared how it was for those who had not yet come as far as he, and he was always reaching down to lend a hand up. He was an extraordinary man. I don't know if you've read his last collection, Dancing After Hours, but in it you can see him coming to terms with the fact that he was in a wheelchair and, as he put it, "crippled." You can see him facing his situation without self-pity and doing with it what only a great writer would do, getting it down on paper, turning the horror and pain and misery of it into literature, into art.
BRENNA: I did read Hours and also the essay collection Broken Vessels. Spiritual and earthy, deeply beautiful works.
KENNEDY: He was a down-to-earth man, and also a spiritual man, and I feel honored to have known him. I've read all his works hungrily, and I could do no better service to young writers out there than recommend the stories of Andre Dubus, any of them, all of them.
BRENNA: Switching gears a little. Do you ever write with the movies in mind? It seems that the only way to break out from the pack these days is to get a movie made of your novel.
KENNEDY: I don't write with movies in mind, though I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing if others do. Some good movies have been made from some good novels, but no film adaptation of a strong novel that I've ever seen has had the power of the novel. Occasionally a film is better than or as good as the novel it is adapted from. I thought the film Midnight Cowboy was better than the book. John Houston's film of Joyce's 'The Dead' was as good a film as I've ever seen. Wonderful movies can be made if you've got real artists like Houston involved.
BRENNA: Do you know the story behind the film adaptation Stanley Kubrick did of Stephen King's The Shining?
KENNEDY: Yes. Kubrick took large liberties with King's book, turned it into a kind of horror burlesque. Real camp. Nicholson is funny as hell, but most of the humanity that was in the book disappears. King's book was about child abuse and the child abuser as victim of his own past. It was pretty moving, so I can understand that he was upset with what Kubrick did.
BRENNA: I've heard that King made his own version and it wasn't very good.
KENNEDY: Yes, he did and you're right, it was not very good, could not at all measure up against Kubrick's even if it did reinstate all the scrapped elements. I think this bolsters the argument that the novel and language are stronger mediums than film. Kubrick made a memorable though slight film out of a good novel; when King tried to reinstate its strengths in a remake, it just doesn't work out.
BRENNA: What do you think of the notion that film is today's literature?
KENNEDY: I do notice that some workshop pieces I get in recent years read like film scripts, but trying to write like that is based on a misunderstanding. Some people think they can see a film in their head and just write the dialogue down, but it doesn't work that way, not for me anyway. As Ezra Pound points out in THE ABC OF READING, poetry (i.e. literature) is made of words while drama is made of people speaking words and that what is lacking in the words they speak can be made up for in the movement of bodies. Some of the most powerful moments on film, reduced to a script, are nothing. Put Jack Nicholson's body behind the words, or Marlon Brando's, or some other great actor and the words come to life. In a film script when you write, "He walks across the room," it works because you've got a Brando or a Keitel or a Robert Duvall or a James Earl Jones waiting to put the power of flesh to those words. If you write in a fiction, "He walks across the room," it is dead wood, pulls no weight, does nothing for the most part.
BRENNA: Yes, some of the hardest scenes to write in fiction are transition scenes from one room to another or from a chair to the kitchen, from a car to a porch.
KENNEDY: That's right, but in a movie, it's more the angle of the camera and the actor doing his or her thing.
BRENNA: But as far as literature goes, what will happen to the language if it's all on the screen?
KENNEDY: You mean if people quit reading and, as you say, make movies their literature?
BRENNA: Yes, that's what I mean. Wouldn't that be the true death of the language and of the novel?
KENNEDY: Language is the supreme medium, always was and always will be. In one of his poems Jack Myers writes, "There is a horse kicking in the brain that must be let out . . ." What film image could ever capture that? A dozen words and you're transported and you don't even need any equipment beyond your eyes and your wits. Dostoevski, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gogol, Flaubert, what film has ever done them justice? Once people understand the power of the words on the page, they stop turning toward films to tell them what life is about and how to live it. In fact, according to surveys that have come out year after year for the past fifty years, as movie-goers age they go to fewer and fewer films and eventually many stop going altogether; but readers of fiction never stop reading.
BRENNA: Bolsters my morale to hear you say that. My grandmother was 83 when she died, but I can't ever remember her going a day without a book in her hand. She would watch the news on TV, cuss at it, then turn it off and pick up her book.
KENNEDY: Older people who have been readers all their lives and whose minds are still active are going to continue reading for as long as they're able. But whether the younger generations will become readers in the first place is unknowable. A good thing that film does very often is send a young man or woman to the bookstore to buy the book from which the film was made. The two mediums often help each other. The breakout for a book is often the result of the movie that was made from it. It shouldn't have to be that way, but there is no denying it.
BRENNA: I agree. Which brings me to this business of selling books. I've read all the reviews on Kerrigan's Copenhagen, Bluett's Blue Hours, & Greene's Summer. Every review is positive, some of them are raves. The praise you get for your writing is what writers dream of having for their works. And yet a major publishing house has never published your books. Can you explain this?
KENNEDY: Well, they must not think my stuff will sell and so they don't want to take a chance. They need to justify their investment, I understand that, and so they need to buy books that the general public will read. You see fifty-seven books face out on a shelf all in a row and every one of them is the same book by John Grisham or a clone of John Grisham. We are not talking about deathless literature here; we are talking about entertainment pure and simple. The trick is to write deathless literature that is also wonderfully entertaining, and the hardest trick of all is to get it noticed and published by a major publishing house, where it might have the chance to flourish.
BRENNA: Publishers have been compared to the sow that eats its own farrow.
KENNEDY: Sounds like something James Joyce might have said. There's a truth in it. More often than not, books are brought out and left to die. Publishers abandon them. As soon as a book loses its support system it is doomed. The most common complaint by writers is that their publishers brought their books out and left them unpromoted, unadvertised, abandoned like unwanted piglets shipped off before they have a chance to grow up.
BRENNA: Remaindered.
KENNEDY: Ugly word. Can you imagine all the great books out there that you will never hear about or read because their publishers got cold feet?
BRENNA: I'm sure it's a staggering number.
KENNEDY: Yes, we probably don't want to know how many.
BRENNA: So how does a writer survive?
KENNEDY: Some don't, of course. The world of major publishing houses and the books they choose is a world of commerce that I don't know much about. All I know is how to get my stuff out to the small presses and out to the literary magazines, and the response has been gratifying, so I have no complaints. If a big house picks up on me at some point, great. If not, I'll survive. Writing fiction is the most important professional activity I know, and whether or not Oprah comes to get me, I will go on writing and love it as long as I live. My life is rich because I read and write literature. Look, writing is not a choice it is a calling, I truly believe that, and you are going to do it no matter what, not because you want to so much as because you NEED to. As Rilke suggests in his Letters To A Young Poet, if you don't NEED to do it, better don't. Or as the then editor of Writers' Forum, Alex Blackburn, put it in a column to aspiring writers, "If you can quit, perhaps you should." That might sound harsh, but to survive as a writer, I think you've got to have that obsession or beguilement or just utter devotion to writing that will make you keep your eye on the work rather than the reward. I'll survive as a writer. I won't be driven to despair and quitting or to suicide. I love writing too much to stop.
BRENNA: Do you know the story of John Kennedy Toole?
KENNEDY: A Confederacy of Dunces. Yes, poor Toole killed himself and then his mother got his novel published and it won the Pulitzer Prize. Such tragedies happen, it's life, it's writing. There is a poem by Kenneth Rexroth about the death of Dylan Thomas, accusing the general American public of having killed Thomas. It is a stirring diatribe in which Rexroth vents some remarkable spleen, raving on for about half an hour and ending with a great shout of:
And all the birds of the deep blue sea
Rise up above the luxury liners and scream:
You killed him. You killed him.
In your goddamned Brooks Brothers Suit, you son of a bitch!
But I really don't buy it. Some writers kind of choose that route, I think. Baudelaire's long disordering of the senses to find truth, and they have a tendency to pop off at 27 or 39 years old, and it is tragic. Don't get me wrong--I thank god that Dylan Thomas's poetry is there, it is wonderful! Keats, too, think what he did in his short life. But others like Wallace Stevens live to a ripe old age and produce formidable work. Eliot is another. And William Stafford. There are poets and poetry and art all around us, and the man in the Brooks Brothers suit is powerless against it because the poet will write no matter what. The poet will sing in the wilderness or roar and rage in the desert. As I said before it is not a matter of choice, it is a calling.
As you say, writing is a religion.
BRENNA: A religion.
KENNEDY: Yes, that's what it is. That's what all art is.
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