Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson

by David Markson

  LS: I’ll indicate a short pause here, in the transcript. But let me praise Markson for a moment, too. Why are you so good at portraying women? Not just the two in Going Down, or all three in Springer—his wife, the one he has the affair with, the old girlfriend who dies—and not even just Kate, whose monologue comprises the sum total of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I noticed it even when rereading your so-called “entertainments” recently, more than one in each book.

  DM: Thank you. You’re sweet too.

  LS: Come on, an answer.

  DM: I don’t have one. I’m pretty sure I was asked that in an interview once before. And all I could say was, could it be because I simply like women? Which would mean, I guess, that I pay attention to them. But the gal in my life at the present moment would probably burst out laughing at the notion. She’s convinced I no longer pay attention to much of anything.

  LS: Don’t you? Because that brings me to another question I’d had in mind. You’ve been quoted as saying you no longer read fiction. Is that still true? And if so, why?

  DM: Still, yes. To a great extent. And here again, no answer. Undeniably, some of the most memorable aesthetic experiences in my life have had to do with novels. To make a bad joke, I’m not even sure I ever responded to a woman at the same depths to which I responded to Ulysses or to Under the Volcano. Or The Possessed. But somehow in recent years they just stopped evoking that older sort of resonance for me. Is it age? Is it possible to have simply read too damned many of the things? And a more subtle question here, that equally troubles me. What has my inability to read novels had to do with the way I myself have been writing over that same period, these books in which I leave out so much of the traditional stuff of fiction—plot, background, incident, description, whatever? Again, I’m a blank.

  LS: Not to mention you’re forgetting an even more critical dimension that you’ve eliminated.

  DM: Meaning?

  LS: Meaning character. Wait, here, let me quote. In Vanishing Point, you say that you’re experimenting—or your protagonist, Author, is doing so—“to see how little of his own presence he can get away with throughout.” Why does Author want to remove as much of himself as possible from the book? Or why do Reader, and Writer, and Novelist, in the other volumes?

  DM: But isn’t the answer in the question itself there, in just the way it’s written? Experimenting to see how little of himself “he can get away with”? Or put the emphasis on the word “experimenting.” Look, when I wrote Reader’s Block, the passages about Reader—well, about Reader and/or the character he calls Protagonist, who he’s thinking of writing about, but who’s obviously an alter ego—that stuff takes up only approximately twenty percent of the book. And the other eighty percent is composed of those intellectual odds and ends we’ve spoken about, the material from the index cards. That itself was obviously an experiment. But then, exactly as I phrased it—to see what I could get away with—in each of the next three books I held down the references to my central figures to no more than one-and-a-half percent. Honestly, that little. Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends. But so then what’s the ultimate experiment, the thrust of it all? To see if, in spite of that, I can still manage to make Writer and Author and Novelist nonetheless actually exist, for whoever’s reading me. And apparently they do—the experiment works. Apparently I not only manage to convey a sense of character in each case, but even some dramatic impact at the end as well. And this, again, in spite of there being only that meager one-and-a-half percent that deals with them directly.

  LS: So obviously the index-card material plays its own crucial role also.

  DM: Obviously. And not just in the way it’s shuffled and rearranged, as we said earlier. That’s often just craft anyway, a question of aesthetic balance. Of getting the parts to interrelate, what I label at least once in each book as “interconnective syntax.” Or call it poetic structure, despite the fictional length. But what matters even more is the choice of materials. When I’m collecting that stuff, I usually copy out six or eight or ten items for every one I eventually keep. Most of which have to deal with age, death, idiotic reviews, impoverishment, whatnot. It’s that which affects that sense of the “portrait” that unfolds—matters that he himself would be preoccupied with.

  LS: Death particularly, indeed. Not just the suicides in Reader, but then how people die, where people die, most recently when they die. Though with overlapping between books also. Why that central preoccupation?

  DM: Hey, Sims, I’m a hundred and nine years old. Can we skip that subject, maybe?

  LS: Okay. How about this instead? How does religion fit into your life? Or the work?

  DM: Not the most appetizing alternative. I mean since it doesn’t, not in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. Yes, there are any number of references to it in the books, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that every single one of them is negative. Or cynical. Or even vehement, about all the bigotry and hatred and misery and disaster it promulgates—wherever, whenever, any form of it. No, there’s no connection with my work at all, certainly no religious impulse behind it.

  LS: Another jump, then. A quote from This Is Not a Novel: “Photography is not an art.” A pretty damning dismissal. And what about film? Does either medium influence you at all?

  DM: I’ve had this argument before. Goodly souls lecturing me about composition, about lighting, all the rest. But in what way does a photograph ever reconceive reality like a Cézanne, say? Or a Matisse? And how can you look at the brush strokes in a van Gogh, or in a Rembrandt—let alone experience the illusion of light bursting out of the pigments in those same very two—and then think of chemically reproduced images on treated paper as genuine art?

  LS: Minor art, at least?

  DM: Okay, I surrender. But as for film, there again I’ve never been a buff. And again, it takes a pretty lax definition to use the word art here also. Too many cooks. Romanticism, thy name may be David, but for me art is one poor disaffected wretch all by himself ripping up sheet after sheet in his garret and silently screaming because he can’t find that elusive single right word.

  Or it’s Michelangelo, flat on his back on that scaffolding, month after month, and now and then dropping heavy planks if he suspects the Pope is down below peeping. I’m borrowing from my latest book there, incidentally. But no, I believe no influence from film at all.

  LS: Tell me about the internet. Or did we already half answer this, when you said you don’t use a computer?

  DM: A good deal of what I know about it makes me want to tear my hair. There seems to be no editorial responsibility out there whatever. And no authority, to evaluate things. I don’t mean those damned-fool reviews that every dimwit and his cousin Hiram can type in, but even drivel from the so-called Web magazines. Good grief, someone wrote an essay on my work, some few years ago, which I happened to see—a long essay—and the simp couldn’t even get the chronology of my life correct, which is readily available. But far more egregious, the piece was patently dishonest. He raised some question or other about what he felt was a major failing of mine, and only at the end did I realize he’d done so without saying two words about one of my most central books, and one which knocked his theory into a cocked hat. Meaning he hadn’t even read it. No print editor would have let him get away with that, but here nobody gave a damn. No, I more than realize the conveniences I’m missing, with no e-mail and the rest, but I suspect I’m enduring very little loss in literary terms by going without.

  LS: Those two old “entertainments,” as you call them—Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat—they were recently reissued by Shoemaker & Hoard. Do you really feel that they are mere “entertainments,” or do they rise above that self-deprecating title?

  DM: Oh, I guess they hold up for what they are, but no, what they “are” are still crime novels, no more. Listen, way back after I did the second one, my agent at the time said the publisher wanted to give me a contract for a series, two a year continually,
with the same detective, and even though I was still not getting much serious work done, I dismissed the idea without a second thought. But as I say, I don’t disavow the things—in fact I got a kick out of rereading them, after forty-five years—but that’s it.

  LS: Is there any talk about your satirical Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee being re-released?

  DM: That would be something else. And after almost the same length of time I’m still pretty proud of that one. I’ve always felt it’s well put together. And everybody found it hilarious—serious-funny, so to say. But then that cretinous Frank Sinatra film sent it eternally down the drain.

  LS: Though perhaps with the film so long forgotten someone might take a new look?

  DM: Don’t transcribe that. People will suspect I asked you to dangle it out there.

  LS: All right, another change of subject. Your latest is called The Last Novel. Naturally, any number of us hope it isn’t that. What’s next?

  DM: Come hell or high water, it will be different from these last four—the index-card four, as we seem to be calling them. I actually threw in a reference to the word “tetralogy” in this last one, but in all truth I’d never initially intended that. After Reader’s Block, I simply found myself addicted to collecting that stuff. I’d even heaped up those cards with each of the next three before I ever had any definite sense of what I’d do with them—like half molding the flesh before I’d contrived the skeleton to hang it on. But after this last one I forced myself, categorically, to quit. I can stumble onto the most seductive anecdote or quotation in the world, one which normally would have been a spectacular thematic fit for me, and I grit my teeth and ignore it.

  LS: Okay, so no index-card material.

  DM: Actually, the basic form will probably be somewhat the same, still “experimental” in that way. Short takes as opposed to lengthy narrative, no fictional baggage, no dramatic scenes, no episodes, and many of what we’ve been calling odds and ends coming from an actual relationship itself. But it’s all extremely tentative in my head still.

  LS: But you used the word “relationship.” You mean a novel about people, plural, instead of merely the isolated single individuals you’ve been dealing with? And not just in these four titles, but as long ago as in Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well?

  DM: Yes. A man and a woman. A guy and a gal. Him, her. Them.

  LS: I’m noticing that twinkle in your eye. You’re not by any chance talking about a love story?

  DM: Who? Didn’t I tell you I’m a hundred and nine years old?

  LS: You’re only seventy-nine.

  DM: And devious, too. When else would you be tricked into calling someone “only” seventy-nine, except after he’d said he was that much older?

  LS: I’m not forgetting that you also just now referred to a woman in your life. Which reminds me that I’d been intending to ask you about your reputation as an archetypal sort of recluse. May I presume you’re no longer quite that?

  DM: She lives in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. It’s forty minutes, from here in Greenwich Village.

  LS: Not a bad commute, especially considering the journey’s end. Do you read on the subway? Or just stare into space, lovesick?

  DM: Can you indicate at this point that I just smacked you upside the head? Ask me something absolutely unrelated, you hear?

  LS: Maybe not wholly unrelated. Since you want to smack somebody, tell me if you ever had a fistfight.

  DM: Good lord. Though as a matter of fact, yes. Once. When I was about thirteen. For what seemed like practically an hour. Back and forth across front lawns, in and out of driveways, between parked cars—neither one of us willing to quit. This being back in Albany, where I grew up. Finally a couple of the older kids who’d been egging us on called it a draw. But what I’d not been aware of, and nobody’d said a word about, was that the other boy was wearing a ring. My face wound up looking as if I’d fallen under the proverbial lawn mower. I was reluctant to go to school for days.

  LS: What is that new look of delight, suddenly?

  DM: I only this instant realize. Ask me an irrelevant question and it turns out to have a literary connection after all. The very kid I fought with is quoted in my latest book.

  LS: You’re not serious?

  DM: Fact. We went on through high school together, and after that I think I saw him no more than two or three times, and not since around the Kennedy years. But lately he’s phoned me now and then. And somehow he stumbled onto one of the books, maybe Vanishing Point. How, I’ve no idea, since he turns out to be unquestionably not a reader. But he called me about it.

  LS: And?

  DM: I quote him without any sort of attribution, just the few words, in an isolated paragraph. He doesn’t even quite sense what he’s saying, or certainly not who he’s saying it to, meaning the author, but it’s extraordinarily appropriate to all the other typical dunderheaded critical put-downs of everybody that I make use of all the way through. The passage that says, “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?”

  LS: Oh god—what did you tell him?

  DM: What could I say? Something like, “Yes, that’s all there is, those little things.”

  LS: David, there’s more. Believe me, there’s rather more.

  DM: Hey, I know. But thank you.

  124 This interview appeared in Rain Taxi, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2007.

  “In Celebration of David Markson,” AWP Conference,

  Chicago, February 2009

  David’s introductory remarks, read aloud by Martha Cooley to the fifty-plus audience members:

  From David Markson, in New York—

  Just a few words of greeting—and regrets that I can’t be there, if only to lurk anonymously in a back corner.

  To Laura Sims, a good buddy—and a good poet—even if I sometimes can’t understand half of what she writes.

  To Francoise Palleau, a dear friend, who’s lucky I’m not 65 years younger—or I’d be chasing after both of her gorgeous daughters.

  To Joe Tabbi, with whom I go back at least twenty years—even if he seems to have lost my address and phone number in the last several.

  To Maria Fitzgerald and Brian Evenson, regrettably, neither of whom I’ve met. But, hell, I’m only 81—there’s plenty of time.

  To Martha Cooley, with whom I’ve shared endless laughter—except when she’s proclaiming in despair, “David, you’ve told me that—three times, already!”

  And to the audience, all two or three of you. It’s been a long haul for me to get to where things like this happen, but that only makes it all the more gratifying. My very best—and my thanks for your interest.

  But one more moment, if I may, a note of an entirely different sort. If anyone is ever doing any work involving my novel Reader’s Block—writing about it—please, please, use the latest edition, the one with the blue-ish gray cover marked 3rd printing, 2007. Because of a horror story I won’t go into here, the 2nd printing, the one dated 2001—for years the most commonly available one—contains endless egregious errors. To this day I don’t know why I’m not serving 20 years to life for having committed homicide because of it. Again, please, quote only the 2007 edition—i.e., the one dated nearest to the time when you’re hearing this—which I believe is fully corrected. Thank you again.

  David Markson

  by Ann Beattie

  Of course I never thought I’d be writing about David Markson when he was no longer with us. I should have done it when he was alive, wondering in his bemused way if anyone who lived in his Greenwich Village apartment had any idea Writer lived in the building, let alone when his birthday was. I wrote a blurb for one of his books, and I had the honor of introducing him in his only reading at the 92nd Street Y, but in between times we just made plans to get together when I returned to the city, saying maybe, meeting—if it worked out—at a restaurant close to his apartment. A glass of wine at lunch, what the hell! And a steak to go with that.
He absolutely would not let me pick him up by cab or car service the night he was reading at the Y, insisting he’d take the subway. He did let me hail a cab back to my hotel afterwards, and he came with me and had a drink at the bar, insisting he’d take the subway back to West 10th. You can’t do anything with people. He was set in his ways, but he liked his routines, his patterns, his freedom. Sometimes not spending money equals freedom, at least to a certain way of thinking: you’re not beholden; you’re used to the silence and the lack of eye contact on the subway, and who wants to have to sit in strained silence with a driver you don’t know? He had no cell phone to consult in the back seat. He probably wouldn’t have known the etiquette about opening a bottle of water. In a cab, he’d have had to listen to the cab driver speaking to someone in another language, or he might have been consulted about his preferred route home when, like any intelligent New Yorker, he knew whatever he said would only result in absolving the cab driver of responsibility if the street was blocked off because a movie was being shot, or if there was a bulldozer in the middle of Sixth Avenue, which no one local ever called “The Avenue of the Americas.”