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  13. <p align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="7">The James Purdy Society</font></p>
  14. <p align="center"><font face="Garamond" size="7">Web Site</font></p>
  15. <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
  16. <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
  17.  
  18. <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: center; line-height: 24.0pt">
  19. <font face="Garamond" size="7">
  20. <span style="font-family: Times; font-weight: 700">Out With James Purdy:</span></font></p>
  21. <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: center; line-height: 24.0pt">
  22. <font face="Garamond" size="7">
  23. <span style="font-family: Times; font-weight: 700">An Interview</span></font></p>
  24. <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left; line-height: 24.0pt">&nbsp;</p>
  25. <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left; line-height: 24.0pt">
  26. <font face="Garamond" size="5"><span style="font-family: Times">James Purdy was
  27. born in 1923 near Paulding, Ohio.<b>&nbsp; </b>He is the author of several
  28. collections of poetry, twenty plays, and sixteen novels, including <u>Malcolm</u>,
  29. <u>Narrow Rooms</u>, <u>Eustace Chisholm and the Works,</u> <u>In a Shallow
  30. Grave</u>, <u>Garments the Living Wear</u>, and, most recently, <u>Out with the
  31. Stars</u>.&nbsp; Despite moments of critical acclaim and popularity, Purdy’s work
  32. generally has met with hostility, ambivalence, and indifference from the
  33. literary establishment.&nbsp; His novels also have provoked a mixed response from
  34. lesbian and gay communities in the US.&nbsp; In this interview, Purdy talks about the
  35. reasons for his neglect; he also discusses racial stereotypes, sexual fantasy,
  36. political correctness, religious fundamentalism, gay relationships, and
  37. contemporary American culture.&nbsp; The interview was recorded on November 27, 1993
  38. at Purdy’s home in Brooklyn, New York.</span></font></p>
  39. <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left; line-height: 24.0pt">&nbsp;</p>
  40. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  41. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  42. Christopher Lane:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  43. Although various articles and two books of criticism have been published about
  44. your work, you have given very few interviews in the past.&nbsp; Is this is a
  45. deliberate policy on your part or an indication of the general neglect that
  46. you’ve received?</font></span></font></p>
  47. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  48. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">James
  49. Purdy:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5"> I think
  50. most people have never heard of me.&nbsp; A whole generation has died out since I was
  51. first published.&nbsp; I was rather young then, and I was very young when I wrote the
  52. stories but no one would publish them at the time, so they were published ten
  53. years after I wrote them.&nbsp; Generally, though, I think we live in a totally
  54. meretricious society that only knows what’s going on now, and most of the
  55. critics have never read anything beyond <u>The Catcher in the Rye</u> which they
  56. think is a great book, of course, and which is surely one of the worst books
  57. ever written. </font></span></font></p>
  58. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  59. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  60. I want to talk with you today about the perceived difficulty and eclecticism of
  61. your writing and your response to the way your texts have been received,
  62. particularly by gay audiences in Britain and the US.&nbsp; Is the suggestion of a new
  63. conservatism and moralism in both these countries affecting how you’re read and
  64. what you can write about?</font></span></font></p>
  65. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  66. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  67. I think I’m so beyond the pale that none of those things reach me.&nbsp; It’s a
  68. strange period because it’s both more lenient toward what I’m writing and more
  69. savage against it.</font></span></font></p>
  70. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  71. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  72. Can you explain that?</font></span></font></p>
  73. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  74. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  75. <u>The New York Times</u> has always been violently homophobic.&nbsp; It’s a policy I
  76. understand now they’ve changed—a little.&nbsp; <u>The New York Times</u> has given me
  77. some good reviews but also many vicious ones—reviews so vicious that I don’t
  78. think any civilized newspaper would publish them. </font></span></font></p>
  79. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  80. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  81. And you think that this is homophobically related?</font></span></font></p>
  82. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  83. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  84. I think it probably is.&nbsp; But it’s also related to a level of philistinism and
  85. ignorance that is abysmal; these are people who just do not respect culture or
  86. humanity. </font></span></font></p>
  87. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  88. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  89. Does the issue of being politically correct surface now, especially since your
  90. work concentrates on a dimension of sexual fantasy that is often—if not
  91. always—at odds with the idea of being politically acceptable?</font></span></font></p>
  92. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  93. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  94. Yes, what they call politically acceptable I call philistinism and stupidity.&nbsp; I
  95. think the women’s movement has harmed writers, and so have some of the black
  96. movements, because they feel you should write about people the way they should
  97. be.&nbsp; You know, we forget that the Dutch did not like Rembrandt because he
  98. portrayed people that weren’t pretty, or a woman cutting her nails, or old
  99. people, and blacks who show every mark of being ruined by slavery.</font></span></font></p>
  100. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  101. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  102. So you think there’s a strong current of idealism now about our acceptance of
  103. gay representations?</font></span></font></p>
  104. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  105. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  106. Well, it’s a false idealism, yes.&nbsp; It’s what I would call cosmetic
  107. respectability.</font></span></font></p>
  108. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  109. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  110. I’m wondering then if one could ever represent a politically correct fantasy?</font></span></font></p>
  111. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  112. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  113. I don’t know—I don’t really think my work is fantasy so much as it’s
  114. unconscious; everyone has an unconscious, even the politically correct.&nbsp; The
  115. politically correct must be very upset by their own dreams because they don’t
  116. believe in the unconscious; they think everything is conscious.&nbsp; They haven’t
  117. read history a whole lot.</font></span></font></p>
  118. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  119. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  120. Or Freud.</font></span></font></p>
  121. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  122. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  123. Or Freud! </font></span></font></p>
  124. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  125. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  126. But there are ways in which the unconscious would have an effect on people’s
  127. fantasies that becomes more difficult when one writes about it, or at least
  128. attempts to.</font></span></font></p>
  129. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  130. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  131. Right, and it makes people uneasy.&nbsp; One of the books that outraged the New York
  132. literary establishment was <u>I am Elijah Thrush</u>.&nbsp; There I’m not dealing so
  133. much with my fantasy—whatever that may be—as an old man’s fantasy, and I call
  134. that realism!</font></span></font></p>
  135. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  136. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  137. Many of your novels have achieved notoriety because of their treatment of sexual
  138. fantasy—I’m thinking particularly of the Crucifixion scene in <u>Narrow Rooms</u>—and
  139. because they seem to deliberately unsettle and disturb our present orthodoxies,
  140. and perhaps pieties, about what we find acceptable, enjoyable, and
  141. reprehensible.&nbsp; Do you see your work as being poised on this unstable boundary
  142. between political, psychical, and ethical issues, and is there an attraction for
  143. you in operating at this level of disturbance?</font></span></font></p>
  144. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  145. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  146. You know, when <u>Narrow Rooms</u> was published someone sent me a large
  147. clipping from a California newspaper.&nbsp; A young preacher had himself crucified to
  148. protest the atom war.&nbsp; Now he was only crucified for a minute or so, then taken
  149. down.&nbsp; But he had read <u>Narrow Rooms</u>, so everything that I write about is
  150. happening.&nbsp; But these politically correct people evidently just see other
  151. politically correct people.</font></span></font></p>
  152. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  153. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  154. Though <u>Narrow Rooms</u> was re-enacted horrifically in real life, was it also
  155. based on a true story?</font></span></font></p>
  156. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  157. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  158. Yes, of my childhood.&nbsp; We knew these new upbeat young men who did several
  159. violent things.</font></span></font></p>
  160. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  161. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  162. Was there something about the scene that drew you to its violence?</font></span></font></p>
  163. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  164. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  165. I don’t know.&nbsp; I was quite horrified by the story myself.</font></span></font></p>
  166. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  167. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  168. So you meant the scene in <u>Narrow Rooms</u> to repel people?</font></span></font></p>
  169. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  170. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  171. Yes.&nbsp; These bourgeois critics are so appalled by the subject, they don’t see
  172. that it is admirable writing.&nbsp; I write, I choose a subject, and I try to give it
  173. everything I have.&nbsp; Beyond that I have no real concern whether people like it or
  174. not.&nbsp; I represent my characters’ fantasies, though.&nbsp; I’m so involved with the
  175. book, I don’t really care if anyone likes it or not.&nbsp; If I can just get it out
  176. the way I want, I know that most critics will not care for it.</font></span></font></p>
  177. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  178. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  179. Part of the reason for my question about the ethical and the psychical stems
  180. from a comment you made in a 1971 interview when you suggested that the only
  181. fictions you’re willing to pursue are those that “bristle with all kinds of
  182. impossibilities.”&nbsp; I assume by impossibility that you refer both to the
  183. difficulty of the text being written and the subject that you intend to convey?</font></span></font></p>
  184. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  185. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  186. Right.&nbsp; I think I learned early on that the only subjects that I could deal with
  187. were impossible.&nbsp; That is, they were impossible to write because they were so
  188. difficult; if I chose an easy subject, I couldn’t write it because it wouldn’t
  189. mean anything to me.&nbsp; So nearly all my books are based on “impossible” subjects.</font></span></font></p>
  190. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  191. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  192. Is there more appeal for you in trying to grapple with this impossibility?</font></span></font></p>
  193. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  194. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  195. Yes, it’s the only one that I can really attempt to portray.&nbsp; Of course the
  196. public is so pleased with tranquilizers, they want a book that tranquilizes—they
  197. don’t want to deal with mine.&nbsp; They want to read the book, be entertained, and
  198. then forget about it.&nbsp; It’s interesting that so many of the best-sellers that
  199. were popular when <u>Malcolm</u> was published are now forgotten.&nbsp; They don’t
  200. even remember the author of <u>By the World Possessed</u>, James Gould Cousins.
  201. Most people have never heard of him, yet that was a runaway best seller.</font></span></font></p>
  202. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  203. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  204. Do you think there is an ethical way of dealing with prejudice, hatred, and
  205. love, or do you find ethics incompatible with psychology?&nbsp; I’m thinking more of
  206. hatred than love because love may seem to us a more manageable and resolvable
  207. issue—what of hatred?</font></span></font></p>
  208. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  209. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  210. I think hatred is the obverse of love, and that’s in <u>Narrow Rooms</u>.</font></span></font></p>
  211. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  212. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  213. Except that it’s so closely bound up with the way you’re grappling in that text
  214. with the issue of antagonism.</font></span></font></p>
  215. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  216. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  217. Right.&nbsp; It is.&nbsp; In America, for instance, we have this love/hate of the black,
  218. and the black of the white.&nbsp; It’s strange that the only part of the country that
  219. has ever understood the black is the South.</font></span></font></p>
  220. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  221. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  222. Could you say more about that?</font></span></font></p>
  223. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  224. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  225. In the North, most people are very “liberal.”&nbsp; They think blacks should have
  226. this and that, but they have never touched a black hand; they’ve certainly never
  227. kissed one.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  228. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  229. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  230. So you think that type of liberalism is a sham?</font></span></font></p>
  231. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  232. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  233. Yes, it’s shallow.&nbsp; The white Southerner has been horrible, of course, to a lot
  234. of black people, but they’re also very close to the black both in hatred and
  235. love. Of course, they’ve done appalling things too, horrible.</font></span></font></p>
  236. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  237. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  238. Often in the name of love.&nbsp; It reminds me of a point Paul Scott made in <u>The
  239. Raj Quartet</u> when he wrote that in an interracial friendship his protagonists
  240. “hide under the thinnest of liberal skins deeply conservative natures.”&nbsp; Maybe
  241. part of what you’re talking about now is the precise conservatism that
  242. circulates around people’s prejudices.</font></span></font></p>
  243. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  244. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  245. Right.&nbsp; I think that most progress in black relationships is totally
  246. superficial.&nbsp; They change the laws but they haven’t changed their hearts.</font></span></font></p>
  247. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  248. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  249. White people haven’t?</font></span></font></p>
  250. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  251. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  252. Yes. I think relationships between blacks and whites are totally superficial,
  253. even fraudulent. </font></span></font></p>
  254. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  255. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  256. In <u>Out with the Stars</u>, your latest novel, Cyril Vane ruminates endlessly
  257. on his “enjoyment of the forbidden,” which seems to be connected to this point.&nbsp;
  258. He also cries, “Rejoice, be happy.&nbsp; All that matters is joy, unenduring joy, the
  259. rest is rubble.”&nbsp; I wonder if there is a difficulty about joy in the framework
  260. of your fiction, and if external and internal forces seem to block it and close
  261. it down in the interests of another force—call it “convention,” “morality,”
  262. “law,” what you will . . .</font></span></font></p>
  263. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  264. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  265. Well each character that I write about is different, so he would have different
  266. prerogatives and different pain.&nbsp; I based Cyril Vane on Carl Van Vechten who
  267. really did believe in joy.&nbsp; He was one of the first white men to have more than
  268. a superficial relationship with blacks.&nbsp; He flouted the convention which said
  269. that if black people visited your home in New York City they had to take the
  270. freight elevator.&nbsp; He told the building clerk, “No, they’re not taking the
  271. freight elevator, they’re coming regular in the elevator!”&nbsp; It seems strange
  272. today that this would be a problem, but actually it’s still a problem.&nbsp; There is
  273. no real equality between blacks and whites.&nbsp; The equality you see is totally
  274. factitious and superficial.</font></span></font></p>
  275. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  276. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  277. Van Vechten’s project is the subject of some controversy now; there is one
  278. school of criticism that would see his project as paternalist and as expounding
  279. a fantasy of the exotic.</font></span></font></p>
  280. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  281. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  282. Well maybe it was, but it’s better than nothing.&nbsp; Is it better to give someone a
  283. sandwich who’s starving or slap them?; I think the sandwich is better.&nbsp; Someone
  284. asked him once if he was pleased with what he’d done for the black people.&nbsp; He
  285. said, “I never did anything for them, they’ve done everything for me.”&nbsp; I
  286. thought that was admirable.&nbsp; A lot of people would think that by his having them
  287. come to his home; of course he also photographed all the famous blacks.&nbsp; So he
  288. knew that that he was giving very little and that they were giving him a great
  289. deal.&nbsp; I don’t think that’s paternalism.&nbsp; I think paternalism is hypocrisy and
  290. self-deceit. </font></span></font></p>
  291. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  292. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  293. Your account of the destruction of much of Cyril Vane’s photographic work after
  294. his death has an obvious resonance with the mass burning of books in Nazi
  295. Germany, and the recent controversy about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography,
  296. particularly his eroticization of race.&nbsp; Perhaps we could talk about how you
  297. would respond the Mapplethorpe controversy, and whether you consider your own
  298. work as implicated in the same difficulty.</font></span></font></p>
  299. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  300. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  301. Well my work is so unknown to the people who are burning Mapplethorpe, I don’t
  302. think they’ve ever heard of me.&nbsp; The media just doesn’t pay any attention to
  303. me.&nbsp; I think if I went out and shot someone, you know, they would like that.&nbsp;
  304. The media loves violence—it loves crime, scandal, filth; it has no time for
  305. anything constructive.&nbsp; You never read anything about people who are really
  306. doing something that’s beautiful.</font></span></font></p>
  307. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  308. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  309. You once stated that “the whole of America is a giant pornographic workshop.”&nbsp;
  310. Now that the sexual and pornographic are pressing and almost intractable issues,
  311. how do you see your writing negotiating this precarious terrain?&nbsp; Some people,
  312. for instance, would describe your own work as pornographic.</font></span></font></p>
  313. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  314. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  315. Yes, it’s not.&nbsp; I think pornography is the obverse of puritanism.&nbsp; They both
  316. hate the body and they don’t believe in love.&nbsp; They think love is dirty and many
  317. homosexuals are that way too—they really think what they are doing is filthy.
  318. </font></span></font></p>
  319. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  320. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  321. So part of your concern is to rid us of this notion and to celebrate the body in
  322. all its pleasures and pains?</font></span></font></p>
  323. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  324. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  325. Right.&nbsp; In <u>Eustace Chisholm</u>, for which I was burned at the stake by <u>
  326. The New York Times</u>, a young man who’s really an Indian chief can’t reconcile
  327. the fact that after nothing but sexual relations with women, he suddenly
  328. realizes he’s in love with this young boy.&nbsp; He can’t face that in himself.&nbsp; And
  329. I think that his problem is everybody’s problem.&nbsp; We can’t face what is most
  330. ourselves, what is deepest in ourselves.&nbsp; Like Macduff, in <u>Macbeth</u>, who
  331. was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped, we want to rip out the really
  332. delicate, beautiful things in us so that we will be acceptable to society.
  333. </font></span></font></p>
  334. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  335. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  336. Perhaps also the most macabre and aggressive elements of ourselves?</font></span></font></p>
  337. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  338. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  339. Well it depends on what you mean by macabre. If it’s something destructive, then
  340. yes.&nbsp; It’s when we don’t face ourselves that we become destructive.&nbsp; </font>
  341. </span></font></p>
  342. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  343. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  344. So violence is partly a response to self-rejection?</font></span></font></p>
  345. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  346. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  347. Right—and to self-hatred.</font></span></font></p>
  348. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  349. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  350. Returning to the your earlier points about race and sexuality, one academic
  351. critic who’s black and gay, Kobena Mercer, has written about the way he first
  352. responded to Mapplethorpe’s work with irritation because it seemed to reproduce
  353. racial stereotypes.&nbsp; He subsequently revised his argument when he considered how
  354. Mapplethorpe challenges the viewer by confronting them with a stereotype, and
  355. that this confrontation seemed to insist on a new kind of attention to the
  356. aesthetic beauty of nonwhite bodies, especially since the aesthetic standard of
  357. beauty is generally formulated by white people.&nbsp; You may not be familiar with
  358. the specifics of this debate, but would you say you’re struggling with a similar
  359. difficulty in a similar way?</font></span></font></p>
  360. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  361. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  362. Well I don’t think I’m that conscious of what I’m doing.&nbsp; I’m dealing so deep
  363. down with the subject that its hard for me to comment.&nbsp; These are political
  364. people speaking, who are talking to other political people.</font></span></font></p>
  365. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  366. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  367. But they’re also people who are reading . . .</font></span></font></p>
  368. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  369. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  370. They’re not reading me, I don’t think.&nbsp; <u>Elijah Thrush</u> was totally ignored
  371. by black intellectuals.</font></span></font></p>
  372. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  373. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  374. Well what about this suggestion of confrontation with stereotype? </font></span>
  375. </font></p>
  376. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  377. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  378. I remember reading in some boring college and a young black man stood up and
  379. said, “Why aren’t your black people proud to be black?”&nbsp; And I said, “Because I
  380. based them on real people, not stereotypes, either from the left or the right.”&nbsp;
  381. I could say the same about my white characters—Why aren’t they proud of being
  382. what they are?&nbsp; See that’s the politically correct which hates art, because art
  383. has a deeper truth than political respectability.&nbsp; A real writer will never be
  384. respected, never, and he’ll never be accepted by the powers that be.&nbsp; He can’t
  385. be.</font></span></font></p>
  386. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  387. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  388. Because as soon as he is, he’s assimilated and neutralized?</font></span></font></p>
  389. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  390. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  391. Yes, he’s been chewed and swallowed.</font></span></font></p>
  392. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  393. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  394. <u>Out with the Stars</u> seems very much preoccupied with these questions about
  395. stereotype, fantasy, and prejudice.&nbsp; At various points your characters struggle
  396. over the difficulties of an ethical relation to love as well as to creativity
  397. and composition (in the example of the two operas), to representation and
  398. censorship (around Cyril Vane’s photography), and finally, to race (for
  399. instance, the two man-servants, Harlan Jost and Ezekiel Loomis), which may be
  400. the most challenging and troubling dimension of your book.</font></span></font></p>
  401. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  402. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  403. Yes, the strange thing about this book is that it’s all based on “fact,” shall I
  404. say.&nbsp; I think the black servant is fully aware of the limitations of Abner
  405. Blossom’s relationship with him.&nbsp; He also feels superior to Abner Blossom, as
  406. most black people feel superior to white people.&nbsp; Now that white people are
  407. trying to be so liberal, they don’t realize how condescending they are, and how
  408. self-conscious they are to other blacks.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  409. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  410. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  411. Which is again close to the tone of this book, and a kind of reverence or awe
  412. for race.</font></span></font></p>
  413. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  414. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  415. I had a very close black friend once who used to beg me to call him a “nigger,”
  416. and I said I just couldn’t do that.&nbsp; He said, “Well you see you’re not really
  417. with me.”&nbsp; Because blacks do, when they’re irked, call themselves niggers—at
  418. least affectionately.</font></span></font></p>
  419. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  420. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  421. But I think most of them would also feel uncomfortable about being called that
  422. by a white man; they would read it as an insult.</font></span></font></p>
  423. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  424. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  425. Right.&nbsp; But he wanted me to do this so he could know that I no longer had that
  426. prejudice and he didn’t have it either.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  427. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  428. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  429. Or pretension?</font></span></font></p>
  430. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  431. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  432. Yeah.&nbsp; I don’t know that that abyss would be conquered.</font></span></font></p>
  433. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  434. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  435. I notice that you preempt this abyss on two occasions in <u>Out with the Stars</u>
  436. by turning around the anger of New York’s African-American communities and by
  437. encouraging their admiration—if not idealization—of Abner Blossom.&nbsp; One of the
  438. closing scenes when he’s carried across the Brooklyn Bridge comes to mind.&nbsp;
  439. However, I’m not entirely convinced by the novel that the issue of
  440. African-American representation in photography or opera can be solved by
  441. appealing to the beauty or the history of these communities.&nbsp; For one thing, the
  442. anger is maybe too extensive; for another, the question of beauty doesn’t
  443. exactly get us off the ethical hook.</font></span></font></p>
  444. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  445. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  446. That’s true.&nbsp; I don’t think there is any solution, so there couldn’t be a
  447. solution in the novel because there’s no solution in life.&nbsp; For a novel to
  448. pretend that it’s found a solution would be a form of madness. </font></span>
  449. </font></p>
  450. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  451. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  452. But wasn’t that scene of hero worship slightly idealized?</font></span></font></p>
  453. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  454. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  455. Well they actually did idolize Abner Blossom, so I can’t judge their worship as
  456. fraudulent.&nbsp; That was the best they had—it would make the writer superhuman to
  457. find a solution to such oppression.</font></span></font></p>
  458. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  459. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  460. It would be interesting perhaps to envisage the possibility of this scene being
  461. reversed: not including pickets of whites angry at their representation by a
  462. black artist, but rather an African-American economically supporting two white
  463. male menservants and then photographing others because of his love of whiteness
  464. . . .</font></span></font></p>
  465. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  466. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  467. Heh!&nbsp; Well, I think that’s happening, but it’s not in the newspapers!</font></span></font></p>
  468. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  469. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  470. I’m not suggesting that you don’t disrupt this economy of representation.&nbsp; <u>In
  471. a Shallow Grave</u> seems to me to offer a striking confusion between economic
  472. and emotional dependency in an interracial friendship between Garnet Montrose
  473. and Quintus Perch.&nbsp; But there’s still something about this scenario that
  474. troubles me—something perhaps about its insistence on loyalty that closes down
  475. other possibilities.</font></span></font></p>
  476. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  477. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  478. I don’t think it’s loyalty, I think it’s love.&nbsp; They respected one another but
  479. they can’t quite say it or do it.&nbsp; And yet the fact that Quintus returned is an
  480. amazing thing.&nbsp; And they neither have the ability to speak the truth because
  481. there’s too much history behind them.&nbsp; But who is left for either of them?&nbsp; When
  482. Garnet goes to his mother’s funeral, Quintus feels that at last he’s found
  483. someone who loves him.&nbsp; Black people will say well this is just shit, you know,
  484. all fake.&nbsp; But it’s as real as these two people can bring up.&nbsp; They’re both
  485. desperate people and have both lost almost everything.&nbsp; It’s like when someone
  486. is on a steamship which is sinking and then there’s a very frail little raft
  487. that comes along.&nbsp; Are you too good to get on the raft or are you going to
  488. sink?&nbsp; Life is not full of perfect political solutions.</font></span></font></p>
  489. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  490. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  491. A lot of your characters are on boats that are sinking . . .</font></span></font></p>
  492. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  493. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  494. Almost all of them.&nbsp; I think humanity is always on a sinking ship.&nbsp; Certainly
  495. America is sinking with outrageous crimes that our government has perpetrated.</font></span></font></p>
  496. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  497. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  498. Is there a fascination for you about this sinking?</font></span></font></p>
  499. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  500. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  501. I’m certainly concerned because it’s everywhere.&nbsp; When you think how America has
  502. declined at every level—moral, spiritual, aesthetic—since before Vietnam, it’s
  503. been downhill every day.</font></span></font></p>
  504. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  505. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  506. I’d like to focus on some of the desperation you’re talking about because it
  507. seems to produce a kind of emotional dependency in the novels we’ve discussed so
  508. far.&nbsp; Some of the subtlety of <u>In a Shallow Grave</u> centers on the way that
  509. each of the men’s friendships is bound up with their fantasy of Widow Rance.&nbsp;
  510. There comes a point, for instance, when Garnet transfers all of his desire for
  511. her onto Daventry, an act which is not only homoerotic but also a statement
  512. perhaps about his idealistic and unrealizable relation to her.&nbsp; I’m wondering if
  513. this doesn’t make all of the relationships you describe quite arbitrary in the
  514. sense that the object and gender of desire becomes less important than the
  515. emotions they provoke and the way they deal with being on a sinking ship.</font></span></font></p>
  516. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  517. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  518. Right.&nbsp; These are very desperate, confused people who are doing the best they
  519. can which, to a person of racial mind, is quite unacceptable.&nbsp; But I think if
  520. you look at anyone’s life, their life is not correct—they’re making one mistake
  521. after another.&nbsp; They’re blundering, they’re falling, they’re hurting people.</font></span></font></p>
  522. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  523. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  524. Are you saying that intimacy with someone is also about a nonrelation with the
  525. person one apparently is involved with?</font></span></font></p>
  526. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  527. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  528. I think we may never know whom we’re loving, and they don’t know who is being
  529. loved.</font></span></font></p>
  530. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  531. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  532. That theme comes across very powerfully in your books.</font></span></font></p>
  533. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  534. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  535. Right. I think that often the statement “Everything we do is wrong” is pressed
  536. on the tombstone of humanity.&nbsp; The little good that comes out of our lives is so
  537. small compared with the terrible mistakes we make.&nbsp; We’re so bewildered and
  538. harassed by our lives and what’s going on around us, it’s a wonder we do
  539. anything right.</font></span></font></p>
  540. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  541. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  542. Perhaps what matters for Garnet is that Widow Rance exists; were she to be
  543. absent, he would be forced to confront his desire for Daventry or Quintus.</font></span></font></p>
  544. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  545. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  546. Right.&nbsp; I think that when the book ends, he makes this decision at least
  547. unconsciously.&nbsp; He tries to get the black man to say he loves him, but neither
  548. of them can say it.</font></span></font></p>
  549. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  550. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  551. That’s interesting because I noticed in the 1988 film version of the novel, the
  552. audience was left with an assurance that the widow and Garnet would marry—</font></span></font></p>
  553. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  554. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  555. I know, that’s outrageous.</font></span></font></p>
  556. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  557. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  558. —an assurance the book does not fulfill.</font></span></font></p>
  559. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  560. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  561. No.&nbsp; Well they steal from me all the time in Hollywood and I’ve never been
  562. inquired of.</font></span></font></p>
  563. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  564. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  565. There are grounds for this reading of loneliness in the film version, though
  566. your treatment of it obviously is more profound.&nbsp; When Garnet announces, “I do
  567. not even believe in death because what I am is emptier than death itself,” your
  568. text begins to examine the difficulty of living and staying alive—of staying on
  569. a ship that’s sinking.&nbsp; Later in the novel, Daventry comments to Garnet, “You do
  570. so cling to life, poor kid.”&nbsp; The same point emerges in <u>Out with the Stars</u>
  571. when the narrator comments about Val in a remarkable statement, “love had not
  572. surrendered him,” almost as if your characters are answerable to a more powerful
  573. force than themselves.&nbsp; Can you comment on this?</font></span></font></p>
  574. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  575. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  576. Well I think all my characters are very confused as to whether life is really
  577. worth living since it’s so horribly painful.&nbsp; Everything changes so that they
  578. really don’t have any fixed idea about anything; they’re clinging to straws.</font></span></font></p>
  579. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  580. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  581. So, at some points they welcome the idea of sinking, almost because it would
  582. annihilate them and would enable them to relinquish self-responsibility.&nbsp; Yet at
  583. other points, they seem to cling to the idea of themselves.</font></span></font></p>
  584. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  585. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  586. With the little that they have, they do cling to the straw, yes.&nbsp; I think that
  587. what keeps most Americans going is drugs.&nbsp; Not just the cocaine and all because
  588. most Americans are on some kind of drug, whether valium or coffee.&nbsp; Some people
  589. drink twenty cups a day, after which I would have to go to the hospital!&nbsp; </font>
  590. </span></font></p>
  591. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  592. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  593. It’s certainly a very addicted culture.</font></span></font></p>
  594. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  595. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  596. They’re all very ill people, but I think it must be worldwide.&nbsp; America is in
  597. the spotlight so you hear about it all the time, but what about the great
  598. companies that run everything?&nbsp; They run us, they make these school children
  599. drink Coca Cola.&nbsp; They tell them to smoke, which they do—they’re all smoking.&nbsp;
  600. They tell them to watch television which is just a pit of filth, nothing but
  601. lies; even the children’s program <u>Sesame Street</u> is full of the most
  602. terrible lies I’ve ever seen.&nbsp; And no one ever protests, not at any of it.&nbsp;
  603. Maybe it’s always been that way. </font></span></font></p>
  604. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  605. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  606. Let’s talk more about the theme of abandonment in your texts because all of the
  607. later references in <u>In a Shallow Grave</u> to Garnet’s dispossession of his
  608. home indicate that he must endure another dispossession—his terror of being
  609. abandoned.&nbsp; This is a powerful and recurrent theme in your writing.&nbsp; So many of
  610. your protagonists beg not to be left alone.&nbsp; Would you say that the terror of
  611. being abandoned is related to an anxious relation to solitude, or is it more
  612. connected to an overinvestment in the love object as a fantasy of
  613. self-completion and fulfillment? </font></span></font></p>
  614. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  615. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  616. In Garnet’s case, he’s lost who he really loves because he’s so deformed.&nbsp; He’s
  617. lost the real Garnet so that actually losing his house seems to be something
  618. that follows naturally.&nbsp; I don’t think he’s even surprised by it.&nbsp; He doesn’t
  619. have the strength to protest it.&nbsp; Since he lost who he was, he might as well
  620. become a derelict and not have a house.&nbsp; But, at the same time, he can’t give up
  621. the historical—the fact that he is part of a continuing history of the old
  622. South.</font></span></font></p>
  623. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  624. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  625. It’s interesting that you talk about giving up the real Garnet because so much
  626. of the novel seems to be an inquiry into who Garnet is and, therefore, whether
  627. that truth factor of his personality actually exists.&nbsp; If the Garnet that loves
  628. Widow Rance seems to be one person, he’s certainly not the same as the Garnet
  629. who loves Daventry or Quintus.</font></span></font></p>
  630. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  631. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  632. No, I think he’s been demolished and reborn, and that’s why losing his house
  633. doesn’t seem as terrible to him as it would if he’d come home a young soldier
  634. all together in one piece.&nbsp; I think then he would’ve fought to save his house.&nbsp;
  635. But he feels as if he’s lost everything except—as you intimate—he’s learned to
  636. love a man.</font></span></font></p>
  637. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  638. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  639. Which is a powerful re-identification.</font></span></font></p>
  640. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  641. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  642. Right, and he doesn’t understand it at all, but he knows that he must.&nbsp; Just as
  643. the boy in <u>Eustace Chisholm</u> doesn’t understand why he’s fallen into this
  644. terrible predicament—he just knows he does love Amos.</font></span></font></p>
  645. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  646. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  647. So love operates as a kind of ineluctable force that breaks through people’s
  648. understanding of themselves?</font></span></font></p>
  649. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  650. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  651. Right.&nbsp; It’s what the Greeks call Eros, which you couldn’t do anything about; if
  652. you resisted, you would be destroyed in Greek mythology.</font></span></font></p>
  653. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  654. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  655. This may be related to your character’s longing for a love relationship that
  656. they have difficulty sustaining; it is also perhaps the reverse side to concerns
  657. about abandonment that constantly recur in your writing.&nbsp; Is it possible that
  658. you don’t fully believe in reciprocity; that the drama of being in love for you
  659. is always narcissistic and distorted by projection?</font></span></font></p>
  660. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  661. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  662. I think most people never learn to love at all.&nbsp; They’re in love with someone’s
  663. body or their eyes, or they remind them of someone they can’t remember, but it
  664. often ends without any real reciprocity.&nbsp; I think it’s a universal predicament
  665. that people don’t ever learn to love; very few people do.&nbsp; They go from one
  666. person to another; they don’t love themselves either.&nbsp; In other words, I’m not
  667. dealing with a problem that is a narrow, personal blindness on my part, but with
  668. a universal tragedy.&nbsp; And the critics blame me, as though I invented these
  669. problems when I’m just writing about them.</font></span></font></p>
  670. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  671. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  672. Then, there is something universal about this limit point to reciprocity?&nbsp; Is
  673. there also something insurmountable for you about knowing someone that prevents
  674. love from being fully receivable?</font></span></font></p>
  675. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  676. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  677. In the New Testament, Peter, one of the disciples of Jesus, says that he can
  678. only forgive someone three times and Jesus replies “No, seven times seven will
  679. he have to forgive.”&nbsp; He’s really talking about love, I think—that if you’re
  680. going to love someone you have to go the whole way; you can’t just do it a
  681. little bit.&nbsp; Most people aren’t willing to go that far.&nbsp; I guess they can’t.</font></span></font></p>
  682. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  683. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  684. In your books, there is also a violence connected to love and to being in love.</font></span></font></p>
  685. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  686. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  687. Yes, I think Eros is the violent god.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  688. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  689. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  690. Eros connected to Thanatos, and not opposed to it?</font></span></font></p>
  691. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  692. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  693. Right.&nbsp; But you see in America, everything can be solved by taking a pill.&nbsp; If
  694. you’re in love with someone, you just take a pill and then you don’t remember.</font></span></font></p>
  695. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  696. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  697. There’s actually something more frightening and challenging about the kind of
  698. love you’re talking about.</font></span></font></p>
  699. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  700. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  701. Right.&nbsp; Most people aren’t up to it, I guess.</font></span></font></p>
  702. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  703. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  704. If <u>Narrow Rooms</u> is the best indication of this violence and challenge,
  705. could you talk about its origins?&nbsp; Is it for instance related to your
  706. characters’ internalization of cultural hatred of homosexuality, or something
  707. independently connected to the ambivalence of losing control, of being dependent
  708. on someone who might leave, and even of hating the one that you want so much?</font></span></font></p>
  709. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  710. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  711. I think hatred of homosexuality is a deep sickness in America, in the world, and
  712. in Christian cultures in general.&nbsp; When you become very indignant over a group
  713. of people, it means you’re connecting with them very deeply.&nbsp; I can’t imagine
  714. there is such a thing as a normal man reading and writing and frothing at the
  715. mouth when he sees two young men kissing one another.&nbsp; He might think “Well,
  716. that’s unusual because I don’t know about that,” but how could he rave and rant
  717. and froth at the mouth?&nbsp; That means he’s connected with homosexuality.</font></span></font></p>
  718. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  719. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  720. And the connection for him is intolerable.</font></span></font></p>
  721. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  722. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  723. Right.&nbsp; I remember one of the most savage attacks on me was made by a writer
  724. named Nelson Algren.&nbsp; Someone told me that he had two great fears—one was that
  725. people would know he was Jewish because he was often stigmatized when he began
  726. writing.&nbsp; The other was that he was really a homosexual.&nbsp; I don’t know whether
  727. either of these claims are true, but the violence of his review of <u>Eustace</u>
  728. was such that he said it was a fifth-grade novel.&nbsp; What does that mean?&nbsp; And
  729. then he used all these clichés.&nbsp; The gist of the review was that since it was
  730. about faggots it could have no meaning for any normal person because faggots
  731. aren’t human; they’re really niggers or Jews or whatever the most hated group
  732. is.&nbsp; So you mustn’t read a book about faggots, apparently, because they’re not
  733. human.&nbsp; But the violence means that this person has deep problems about his own
  734. identity.</font></span></font></p>
  735. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  736. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  737. That assumption about being inhuman is closely tied, I think, to the assumption
  738. that homosexuality is unnatural, and that if it’s unnatural it can be rejected
  739. and dismissed.</font></span></font></p>
  740. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  741. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  742. Or extirpated by law.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  743. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  744. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  745. When in fact it never goes away . . .</font></span></font></p>
  746. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  747. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  748. No.&nbsp; It reminds me of when I was in the army—I knew a lot of boys were queer or
  749. gay.&nbsp; I just knew they were but they did their work properly, and I did my work
  750. as best I could.&nbsp; There was no problem.</font></span></font></p>
  751. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  752. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  753. Was there a connection between you and them?</font></span></font></p>
  754. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  755. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  756. Well, we were moved around so much that you never saw the boys you did basic
  757. training with again.&nbsp; So I don’t know what became of them, but I didn’t form any
  758. real friendships because I was very uncomfortable there.&nbsp; I knew that at least
  759. one out of ten was gay and many more I observed were having sexual relations
  760. with men in town.&nbsp; They offered no threat to discipline or anything else because
  761. they were good soldiers.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  762. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  763. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  764. I’d like to hear more about you being in the army at this time.</font></span></font></p>
  765. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  766. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  767. Oh, well I was terrified to be in.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  768. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  769. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  770. And in relation to these other men?</font></span></font></p>
  771. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  772. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  773. Oh, I had nothing to do with any of them, except that I was friendly to them.&nbsp;
  774. They didn’t know anything about me.&nbsp; The army was so large you just got lost in
  775. it.&nbsp; If I hadn’t been in the army, I couldn’t have written <u>Eustace Chisholm</u>
  776. because I got enough material.&nbsp; Everything that happens to a writer, he’s going
  777. to use.&nbsp; He’s a real sponge.&nbsp; Except these intellectual writers—I think they
  778. always write about something they have thought about but never experienced.</font></span></font></p>
  779. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  780. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  781. Was there a period of emotional discomfort for you about the presence of other
  782. gay men in the army?</font></span></font></p>
  783. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  784. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  785. No, I was having other problems.&nbsp; It didn’t bother me whether they were gay or
  786. not.&nbsp; I was just having problems being there because I didn’t belong.&nbsp; But I
  787. guess the other boys didn’t belong there either.&nbsp; I guess we never belong
  788. anywhere!</font></span></font></p>
  789. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  790. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  791. And did you go through a period of antagonism or discomfort about your own
  792. sexual identity?</font></span></font></p>
  793. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  794. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  795. Oh yes, but my whole life was so difficult; that was not any more difficult than
  796. the rest.&nbsp; Everything was so hard for me.&nbsp; My family was separated, etc. etc.&nbsp;
  797. It still is very hard because I don’t feel that anyone knows who I am in
  798. America.&nbsp; I don’t even care anymore.&nbsp; Maybe I never cared.&nbsp; It’s a totally
  799. factitious culture, and fictitious too.&nbsp; It is a culture that despises the
  800. soul.&nbsp; Everything is money, conformity, fashion, shallowness, cruelty; it’s a
  801. great, great cruel society.&nbsp; And it’s now very sick because these children are
  802. killing one another.&nbsp; No one is doing anything about the real problems.&nbsp; We have
  803. a government that’s totally corrupt and television is a great bleeding rectum
  804. spewing filth which is poisoning everyone.</font></span></font></p>
  805. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  806. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  807. That’s a very powerful image!</font></span></font></p>
  808. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  809. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  810. It’s a bacilli on wheels.&nbsp; I’m ashamed to own a television.&nbsp; I hardly ever turn
  811. it on because first of all it’s too loud, and then we see these cretins—all you
  812. hear is this ersatz English.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  813. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  814. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  815. The relationship between Val and Luigi in <u>Out with the Stars</u> seems to
  816. demonstrate some of the ambivalence and frustration you have talked about in
  817. relation to love and intimacy, especially because Luigi is powerfully affected
  818. by a text that reads, “When love has reached its highest perfection, it can only
  819. begin to decline and like the sun set in darkness.”&nbsp; You seem to be suspicious
  820. of rapture in a love relation, but are you also troubled by the inevitability of
  821. its disillusion and demise?</font></span></font></p>
  822. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  823. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  824. Yes, it’s very sad.&nbsp; I’m sure you don’t mean this, but your question seems to
  825. imply that there should be perfection in this world, that rapture should
  826. continue, and that when I portray it as ending there’s something wrong with my
  827. portraying that way.</font></span></font></p>
  828. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  829. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  830. No, only that your characters seem to be stuck between two options—either to
  831. pursue rapture and to try and live it out to the full, as Cyril Vane does, by
  832. keeping that idea of endurable joy, or to confront its demise, and learn to do
  833. without, which is shattering and painful for them.</font></span></font></p>
  834. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  835. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  836. I think that’s true of AIDS.&nbsp; We’ve never had a culture in America where young
  837. men were free to go.&nbsp; Instead of going to church and flirting with someone,
  838. they’ve been able since the sixties to go to places where young men abandon
  839. themselves to other young men.&nbsp; I don’t think the rapture lasted very long and
  840. the awful thing—which is like something in Greek tragedy—is they got this
  841. horrible disease which is unprecedented in the history of the world.&nbsp; I mean the
  842. Black Death killed one third of the population of Europe, but at least you died
  843. in a few days or weeks.&nbsp; It was not dragged out.&nbsp; And you didn’t know how you
  844. got it either.&nbsp; But death, like the rain, falls on the just and the unjust.&nbsp;
  845. Everyone got it or didn’t get it.</font></span></font></p>
  846. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  847. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  848. But there’s obviously no justice to getting AIDS by going to the bathhouses.&nbsp;
  849. You say that they had no option—that they couldn’t flirt in church, for
  850. instance.&nbsp; So it’s a tragedy, but it’s not justice.</font></span></font></p>
  851. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  852. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  853. No it certainly isn’t.&nbsp; It’s horrible.&nbsp; It shouldn’t have had that effect—it’s
  854. just some mistake in the nature of things, so that I’m sure in earlier periods
  855. in America young men did find one another but not so freely.</font></span></font></p>
  856. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  857. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  858. You commented on my presumption that there should be a success to a
  859. relationship—that the rapture should be sustained.&nbsp; It’s tempting to ask you
  860. what dynamic would indicate a successful relationship for you—you mentioned
  861. flirting in church . . .</font></span></font></p>
  862. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  863. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  864. I think the only successful relationships between men are when they find a
  865. deeper spiritual connection.&nbsp; And there are such friendships that last a
  866. lifetime.&nbsp; When you look at heterosexual relationships you find the same thing,
  867. that most of them end in failure.&nbsp; Statistics say that most marriages are a
  868. total mistake—they end in divorce, or at least a great percentage do.&nbsp; So it’s
  869. very hard to have an enduring relationship with anybody, including your
  870. parents.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  871. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  872. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  873. There’s something almost Proustian about this inevitable failure and
  874. disappointment.</font></span></font></p>
  875. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  876. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  877. That’s great writing proof.&nbsp; I think he’s so much greater than Joyce.&nbsp; He’s to
  878. me not even a novelist.&nbsp; I find Joyce’s characters very parochial, not examined
  879. in depth.</font></span></font></p>
  880. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  881. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  882. What fascinates you about Proust is a level of self-involvement with one’s
  883. fantasies?</font></span></font></p>
  884. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  885. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  886. Right.&nbsp; And there’s a galaxy of characters, there’s just a whole opera house of
  887. characters.&nbsp; Proust was a great novelist.&nbsp; Joyce is sort of like a wordsmith.&nbsp; I
  888. like <u>Finnegan’s Wake</u>, the best thing he wrote.&nbsp; But I don’t find his
  889. characters involved and interesting.</font></span></font></p>
  890. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  891. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  892. The same kind of difficulty about successful relationship seems to emerge in <u>
  893. Garments the Living Wear</u>.&nbsp; But this novel may be more disturbing and
  894. unsatisfying than the others because it resists any idea of sexual truth.&nbsp; We
  895. talked about this before with Garnet Montrose, the real Garnet.&nbsp; You represent
  896. gay characters as being interested in heterosexuality and bisexual characters’
  897. complete indifference in gender, which is quite disconcerting for gay and
  898. straight readers alike.&nbsp; So, for instance, you write that “Jared’s predilection
  899. for young boys was as well known to her unfortunately as his other weakness for
  900. mature women.”&nbsp; I’d like you to talk about the anxiety that emerges from our
  901. being denied a sexual truth about your characters’ preference, and the
  902. insistence that we discover one—or, perhaps, the ambiguity we confront when we
  903. don’t know whether they <u>have</u> a preference.</font></span></font></p>
  904. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  905. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  906. I think Jared is resisting his own homosexuality in trying to love women.&nbsp; Many
  907. homosexuals go through that.&nbsp; They do have sexual, rather heated sexual contacts
  908. with women and then they realize that’s just not real.</font></span></font></p>
  909. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  910. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  911. But one could also say that Jared is very content with his male lover.</font></span></font></p>
  912. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  913. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  914. Oh yes.</font></span></font></p>
  915. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  916. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  917. So his resistance to being gay doesn’t seem appropriate . . .</font></span></font></p>
  918. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  919. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  920. Well it’s based on a real person who did that, which just shows that you never
  921. get over prejudice you’re brought up with—you never quite get rid of it.&nbsp; Even
  922. when you think it out, it is still inside of you.</font></span></font></p>
  923. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  924. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  925. I guess that what interested me in <u>Garments the Living Wear</u> was a
  926. reworking of the coming out story in which one gives up a “false” identity to
  927. take on an “authentic” and “truthful” identity by declaring “I am gay” or “I am
  928. lesbian.”&nbsp; However, you begin with—and then transform—already gay characters who
  929. seem satisfied and content with their preference.&nbsp; So the myth of coming out
  930. into a truthful, honest identity seems to be challenged in the process.</font></span></font></p>
  931. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  932. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  933. Well, I based the novel on a young man who is very ambivalent toward women, so
  934. I’m stuck with the model and not the point of view.&nbsp; That’s another thing that
  935. critics don’t understand in me—I’m basing these texts on real people and they
  936. want something thought out, you see.&nbsp; People don’t think out their lives, they
  937. are tossed as if on waves by every wind that comes, and man is not a rational
  938. creature.&nbsp; But the critics seem to think there is such a thing as rational
  939. behavior.&nbsp; They haven’t read history, I guess, which is a collection of
  940. lunacies.&nbsp; We contradict ourselves every day.&nbsp; Life is contradictory.&nbsp; What we
  941. are one day, we’re not the next. </font></span></font></p>
  942. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  943. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  944. But it’s almost, at times, as if you’re suggesting there’s something too
  945. “straight” about a man who loves men.&nbsp; Val Sturgis in <u>Out with the Stars</u>
  946. is, for instance, a much less complex character than is Cyril Vane, whose
  947. “indiscriminate love” is much harder to pin down.</font></span></font></p>
  948. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  949. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  950. Val Sturgis is very happy being gay, and he has no intent of ever changing or
  951. even thinking about any other form.&nbsp; Cyril Vane is much more complicated.&nbsp; He
  952. actually has been married several times.&nbsp; And yet I think the woman he’s married
  953. to is sort of an anchor to his stability.&nbsp; And then his dream world is these
  954. young men—many of them black—whom he has to have.&nbsp; She sort of understands that,
  955. though she’s very jealous.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  956. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  957. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  958. But she also despises it later on.</font></span></font></p>
  959. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  960. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  961. I know.&nbsp; And yet she can’t give him up so, to keep him, she has to keep his
  962. fantasy or whatever you want to call it.&nbsp; I know a woman who loved this man
  963. deeply but he had one vile habit.&nbsp; He chewed tobacco and he spat these golden
  964. spittoons all over the house.&nbsp; She just thought at times she’d kill herself or
  965. leave him and yet she couldn’t.&nbsp; But he had that one horrible habit, and I think
  966. that’s love.&nbsp; Nobody’s very nice, really.&nbsp; You have to put up with terrible
  967. things.&nbsp; And we have to put up with ourselves, which is an unclean beast in
  968. straw.</font></span></font></p>
  969. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  970. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  971. Perhaps that’s the hardest part of all!</font></span></font></p>
  972. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  973. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  974. Right!</font></span></font></p>
  975. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  976. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  977. Connected with this point, is there something less certain and therefore more
  978. enigmatic for you about bisexuality?&nbsp; I noticed for instance that <u>Garments
  979. the Living Wear</u> often uses an indeterminacy about desire and sexual
  980. preference to indicate precisely how little we know about ourselves and other
  981. people. </font></span></font></p>
  982. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  983. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  984. Right.&nbsp; We’re not here long enough to figure out that much.&nbsp; And most of the
  985. time we have so many problems just to find enough money to pay the rent.&nbsp; These
  986. reviewers seem to think everything should be figured out.&nbsp; I don’t know where
  987. they’re coming from.&nbsp; I’m sure their own lives must be a mess. </font></span>
  988. </font></p>
  989. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  990. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  991. That mess is perhaps related to another anxiety that <u>Garments</u> explores,
  992. which is our inability to attach any truth to anatomy.&nbsp; Is this again used to
  993. unsettle and disturb our expectations, to make us confront our wish to see
  994. Estrellita as either a man or a woman and therefore to know whether Edward
  995. Hennings is an honest gay or a confused heterosexual?</font></span></font></p>
  996. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  997. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  998. [Laughs.]&nbsp; Well I think Shakespeare suffered from this.&nbsp; I think he loved men
  999. but he says “Nature as she fell a doting added one thing to my purpose nothing.”
  1000. &nbsp;I guess he meant his cock, of course.&nbsp; But that doesn’t mean you’re not gay.&nbsp;
  1001. He loved the rest of his body and he loved it as a boy’s body and not as a
  1002. girl’s.&nbsp; I think Edward Hennings is in the same place.</font></span></font></p>
  1003. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1004. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1005. Have you seen Neil Jordan’s film <u>The Crying Game</u>?</font></span></font></p>
  1006. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1007. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1008. No.</font></span></font></p>
  1009. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1010. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1011. Because, it also seemed to draw on this transgender confusion and to be borrowed
  1012. from <u>Garments</u>.</font></span></font></p>
  1013. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1014. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1015. Probably it was.&nbsp; I’ve been told that I’m stolen from all the time.&nbsp; But I often
  1016. see a girl I think is so beautiful I’d like to love her because she looks like a
  1017. boy, so it’s very enticing.&nbsp; And you think, I could really live with a girl like
  1018. that because she looks like a boy.&nbsp; So you see this gets back to the fact that
  1019. nothing is simple.&nbsp; And even when it looks simple, it’s not going to be simple
  1020. tomorrow.&nbsp; So I’m accused by these awful reviewers that there’s something wrong
  1021. with me.&nbsp; What’s wrong is they’re not studying people, they don’t know people.</font></span></font></p>
  1022. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1023. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1024. <u>Garments the Living Wear</u> often draws on magical realism, which may
  1025. explain some of its difficulty to readers accustomed to psychological realism.&nbsp;
  1026. The scene with the evangelist, Jonas Hakluyt, bursting into flames is one of the
  1027. most astonishing and powerful in the book.&nbsp; I wonder if you meant this to be
  1028. read as a just apotheosis for a religious fanatic or to parody the spectacular
  1029. allegories of the Bible, where these kinds of events occur all the time and
  1030. we’re expected to simply believe them.</font></span></font></p>
  1031. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1032. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1033. Well in America the most terrible things are happening all the time.&nbsp; I don’t
  1034. know how they think I invented these events.&nbsp; Don’t they read the newspapers?&nbsp;
  1035. I’m horrified by all of them, I can’t believe what’s going on.&nbsp; To go back to <u>
  1036. Narrow Rooms</u>, that young man had himself crucified—that was on the front
  1037. page of all the California papers.&nbsp; A young man was angry here because he was
  1038. told he couldn’t enter this Hispanic dance hall because he’d been misbehaving,
  1039. and was told not to come back.&nbsp; He came back with a whole jug of gasoline,
  1040. poured it, set fire and killed eighty-two people—they were all burned to crisp.&nbsp;
  1041. He’s been sent away for life, of course, but that happens every day in New York,
  1042. something like that.</font></span></font></p>
  1043. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1044. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1045. And so your use of that example is to demonstrate the kind of fanaticism that
  1046. surfaces around religion?</font></span></font></p>
  1047. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1048. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1049. Well religion is like Eros, I think, or most of it is.&nbsp; It’s crazy.&nbsp; Did you
  1050. ever hear of the Holy Rollers?&nbsp; [Laughs.]&nbsp; They speak in tongues and they roll
  1051. on the floor!&nbsp; I don’t know if they exist anymore.&nbsp; I guess they’re called
  1052. Pentecostals now.&nbsp; But as a child I used to peek in their doings and I was quite
  1053. frightened because they were grown-up people acting like animals.&nbsp; </font>
  1054. </span></font></p>
  1055. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1056. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1057. When Edward Hennings insists that “Jesus is an invention of everybody’s fancy,”
  1058. you seem to be making a comment not only about the terrifying fervor of
  1059. evangelism in the States but also about our capacity for putting trust in the
  1060. most exploitative of structures and our demand to have some kind of faith in a
  1061. system of meaning.</font></span></font></p>
  1062. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1063. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1064. I think religion asks us to believe in the unbelievable.&nbsp; It’s very hard to
  1065. believe that Jesus was the only begotten son of God.</font></span></font></p>
  1066. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1067. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1068. Or that he was produced by an Immaculate Conception . . .</font></span></font></p>
  1069. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1070. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1071. Yes, and that if we believe in him we’ll go to paradise with the thief on the
  1072. cross.&nbsp; I don’t know that the real Jesus believed any of those things.&nbsp; That’s
  1073. what we’re asked to believe, and no one can believe it. </font></span></font>
  1074. </p>
  1075. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1076. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1077. Is religion for you, to quote Edward Hennings, “what has made America a nation
  1078. of meringue brains”? </font></span></font></p>
  1079. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1080. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1081. Well that’s his opinion, not mine.&nbsp; But there’s truth in it.&nbsp; I don’t know
  1082. whether it’s religion that’s made us meringue brains but something has.&nbsp; Maybe
  1083. it was Mr. Reagan who had a meringue brain . . .</font></span></font></p>
  1084. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1085. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1086. Would you consider that we’re all living under a kind of pervasive hypnosis—the
  1087. kind that prevents us from inquiring into the truth of our personal, social, and
  1088. even global conditions because, like Garnet Montrose, we are too dispossessed to
  1089. ask the right questions?</font></span></font></p>
  1090. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1091. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1092. Right.&nbsp; I think we’re all punch drunk, we all have softening of the brain.&nbsp;
  1093. We’ve had to witness too much history.&nbsp; I think that’s why young people don’t
  1094. seem to know anything.&nbsp; I think there’s too much to know, so they have just
  1095. conked out.</font></span></font></p>
  1096. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1097. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1098. And there’s been too much atrocity.&nbsp; Is some of the atrocity of history related
  1099. to the World Wars for you, or to Vietnam and the Holocaust?</font></span></font></p>
  1100. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1101. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1102. It’s just too much to swallow.&nbsp; The other day a friend of mine who collects
  1103. stamps went to the post office to get the new Joe Lewis and a young black woman
  1104. waited on him.&nbsp; And he said, “Oh isn’t this a nice stamp, I like this very
  1105. much.”&nbsp; She said, “Yes.&nbsp; By the way, who was Joe Lewis?”&nbsp; He thought she was
  1106. joking!&nbsp; But it’s still shocking that a black girl wouldn’t know one of their
  1107. most famous heroes.&nbsp; It shows that people have conked out; they don’t want to
  1108. hear about history.</font></span></font></p>
  1109. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1110. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1111. We’ve already talked about your radical treatment of sexuality and gender in <u>
  1112. Garments the Living Wear</u>, but the book also struck me as forming a dialogue
  1113. with very recent debates about queer identity, politics, and desire.&nbsp; Would you
  1114. consider your work as part of this reappraisal of sexual identity or is the
  1115. queer movement demonstrating for you an antagonism between gay generations
  1116. because it plays up an unrealistic fantasy of self-invention and a too-easy
  1117. dismissal of the past?</font></span></font></p>
  1118. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1119. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1120. Yes, I don’t know that I have it thought out quite that clearly, but it’s what I
  1121. feel.&nbsp; That I don’t think the gay movement is kind to art or to artistic truth.&nbsp;
  1122. I don’t think any political movement is going to like artists.&nbsp; They only like
  1123. people like themselves—naysayers.&nbsp; So much of this is like the writer David
  1124. Leavitt who wants gays to be very nice people.</font></span></font></p>
  1125. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1126. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1127. And not to have sex.</font></span></font></p>
  1128. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1129. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1130. And not to have sex.&nbsp; And to be well-behaved bourgeoisie.&nbsp; So he could be
  1131. published and praised by <u>The New Yorker</u>, which hates anything that is
  1132. seminal.&nbsp; His characters never have anything but nice talk.&nbsp; But many gay
  1133. writers are like that and of course his books are applauded by the media, or
  1134. were.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  1135. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1136. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1137. So you feel you have more in common with more recent movements like ACT-UP and
  1138. Queer Nation?</font></span></font></p>
  1139. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1140. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1141. Yes, because I think I’ll always be—I hate to say this, I hate to categorize
  1142. myself—but I guess I’ll always be a revolutionary.&nbsp; Whatever is, is wrong.&nbsp;
  1143. </font></span></font></p>
  1144. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1145. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1146. Talking of revolutionary and peripheral positions, I know you have immense
  1147. respect for Jean Genet’s writing but I’m interested to know if you see yourself
  1148. in dialogue with contemporary gay writers, presumably not David Leavitt.</font></span></font></p>
  1149. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1150. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1151. I imagine David Leavitt is a very nice person.&nbsp; He has written me letters, he
  1152. wants to use one of my stories in an anthology.&nbsp; But he and I just belong to
  1153. different worlds, really.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  1154. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1155. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1156. And other contemporary gay writers?</font></span></font></p>
  1157. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1158. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1159. There’s Matthew Stadler, who arranged my recent trip to Seattle.&nbsp; And I met
  1160. other gay writers there that are very close to me.&nbsp; There’s one gay writer that
  1161. is very interesting, Tom Spandbauer, who wrote <u>The Man Who Fell in Love with
  1162. the Moon</u>.&nbsp; It’s a new thing in gay writing.</font></span></font></p>
  1163. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1164. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1165. Your work has always reminded me in the best possible way of the visual subtlety
  1166. and sexual nuance of Derek Jarman’s films.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  1167. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1168. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1169. Oh yes, he’s trying to do <u>Narrow Rooms</u>, but he’s too ill to do it.</font></span></font></p>
  1170. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1171. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1172. That’s interesting because <u>Out with the Stars</u> seems to end with a gesture
  1173. to Jarman’s <u>The Garden</u> in its closing references to religious parody.&nbsp;
  1174. I’m sure in turn that your fiction has had a big impact on his films, especially
  1175. <u>The Last of England</u>, <u>Caravaggio</u>, and <u>Edward II</u>.</font></span></font></p>
  1176. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1177. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1178. Right.&nbsp; I think he was filming that when I met him.</font></span></font></p>
  1179. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1180. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1181. Could you give me your thoughts about his work?</font></span></font></p>
  1182. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1183. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1184. I like it very much.&nbsp; I like him and his friend Keith Collins, who takes good
  1185. care of him.&nbsp; Keith said I was one of his heroes, which is nice because I always
  1186. feel I’m neglected.&nbsp; People say that’s your paranoia.&nbsp; No, it’s not.&nbsp; Is it
  1187. paranoia to be black and think you’re going to be lynched?&nbsp; No, that isn’t
  1188. paranoia; that’s genuine knowledge.&nbsp; I always feel that no one knows me and
  1189. then, when Derek Jarman wants to film me, I realize people do know me,
  1190. somewhere.&nbsp; And that I’m influencing people.</font></span></font></p>
  1191. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1192. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1193. Do you see your work as going in tandem with his? </font></span></font></p>
  1194. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1195. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1196. No, I think I’m always . . . I don’t like to say ahead of him, but I’m going
  1197. ahead and he’s at the end, he says.&nbsp; So I imagine, not to blow my own horn, but
  1198. I imagine I’m going to influence other real filmmakers, as opposed to American
  1199. filmmakers who are doing absolutely nothing, they’re just dead, dead, dead.&nbsp;
  1200. They’re recycling everything.&nbsp; Now they have the dinosaurs [in <u>Jurassic Park</u>],
  1201. you see that’s all just a joke.&nbsp; </font></span></font></p>
  1202. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1203. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1204. Perhaps the danger of reading your work, as you intended, is that it will
  1205. confront your readers with elements of ambivalence, prejudice, and hatred for
  1206. which they may have very little tolerance.</font></span></font></p>
  1207. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1208. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1209. Right.&nbsp; That’s true of my readers, or most of them.</font></span></font></p>
  1210. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1211. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1212. Could you explain some of the ways in which you’ve been taken up, misread, or
  1213. simply ignored by the literary establishment?</font></span></font></p>
  1214. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1215. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1216. Oh, it’s almost total.&nbsp; Even some of the good reviews don’t understand what I’m
  1217. writing.&nbsp; I think intellectuals are the worst sinners because they want
  1218. everything clear and life is not clear.&nbsp; Actually I think my books are very
  1219. clear, but they don’t get it because they come with preconceived notions as to
  1220. what fiction should be and what political correctness should be.</font></span></font></p>
  1221. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1222. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1223. Perhaps in addition to clarity, we’re placing too much emphasis on resolution.&nbsp;
  1224. Are you more interested in maintaining irresolution as the most satisfying way
  1225. to live?</font></span></font></p>
  1226. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1227. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1228. I don’t have it thought out that clearly.&nbsp; The book takes me with it.&nbsp; The
  1229. “truth” of the book carries me along.&nbsp; I always know that I have to be wrong to
  1230. be right.&nbsp; I remember that when I wrote what people think is my most ambitious
  1231. book, <u>The House of the Solitary Maggot</u>, I based it on the stories my
  1232. grandmother told me.&nbsp; They shoot out the young boy’s eyes in the book.&nbsp; When I
  1233. was rewriting that, “I thought I just don’t think I’ll have this, it’s too much
  1234. for me.”&nbsp; And then it was as though my grandmother’s voice came, and she said,
  1235. “No, I’m sorry, but that has to go in the book because that was the story I told
  1236. you, so don’t change it.”&nbsp; So you see, I sometimes am thinking of being false to
  1237. myself, and that’s one reason I’m not successful because the books are “true” as
  1238. far as I’m concerned, and that isn’t the truth the public will ever like.</font></span></font></p>
  1239. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1240. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">CL:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1241. And it’s that truth factor that keeps you writing, even if it’s also
  1242. uncomfortable and on some level impossible.</font></span></font></p>
  1243. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 24.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt">
  1244. <font face="Garamond"><u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">JP:</font></span></u><span style="font-family: Times"><font size="5">
  1245. Right.&nbsp; I always have to be wrong to be right, but I’m used to that.&nbsp; You just
  1246. have to not worry about society, what it thinks.&nbsp; It’s never going to like
  1247. anyone, gay or straight; society is this dumb brute.&nbsp; Of course it’s harder to
  1248. be gay than straight because society doesn’t like us and never will; it doesn’t
  1249. like anyone really.&nbsp; It’s so immersed in its own mire and people are really very
  1250. stupid except about their own feelings.&nbsp; They show no interest in their own
  1251. country, and they don’t care about what we do.</font></span></font></p>
  1252. <p class="MsoNormal">&nbsp;</p>
  1253. <p align="center">&nbsp;<p align="center">&nbsp;
  1254. <p align="center">&nbsp;
  1255. <p align="center"><a href="Index.htm"><font face="AGaramond Bold" size="5" color="#800000">Back
  1256. to the James Purdy Society Index Page</font></a></p>
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