How He Came to Be Somewhere: An Interview and Three Early Stories

by Jonathan Franzen

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you recall any pieces in particular?

  FRANZEN

  The piece I had the most fun with was a fall campus-fashion preview. I wrote it as a joke, in very ornate prose.

  INTERVIEWER

  There are several fashion articles in the archive.

  FRANZEN

  Several articles? Good Lord. I was having a bad time at school. Those fashion pieces probably came out of a wish to antagonize.

  INTERVIEWER

  A bad time?

  FRANZEN

  I had bad dorm rooms, and I’d landed in a nerdy situation as a prospective physics major. There were very few cute girls, and those few had no interest in me. My only significant ambition was to get laid, and I was failing spectacularly at it, for reasons now obvious to me but completely invisible at the time. I thought about transferring to a different school, but then I realized that if I majored in German I could go to Europe for a year, and that things might be better there.

  Things were not better there, at least not girlwise. But I came back to the States less outrageously immature. And every once in a while a person’s life feels like a novel, and the eight weeks in the middle of my last year of college were a time like that. Everything came together quickly, all the stuff that had been latent suddenly crystallized, and I felt transformed in the space of eight weeks. I became a human being. By the end of that January, I was having sex with the person I would end up married to for fourteen years, and I’d become a determined, focused writer who wanted to do nothing but write ambitious novels.

  INTERVIEWER

  What had happened?

  FRANZEN

  I wrote about it in The Discomfort Zone—my discovery, as Rilke puts it in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, that I had an interior life I’d previously known nothing about. It had to do with reading Rilke and Kafka and the other modern German prose writers, and it had to do with my brother Tom. It had to do with having been away from my family for so long—with coming back and suddenly being able to see them in the framework that the German moderns had given me. It had to do with falling in love.

  INTERVIEWER

  What about your brother?

  FRANZEN

  I was in deep emulation of Tom, who had begun as a still photographer and then moved into avant-garde film. I admired Tom’s equipment, as it were. Right before I’d gone to Germany, I’d worked for him as a laborer in Chicago and had made enough money to buy a little Olympus, the smallest SLR on the market, which I took to Europe and tried to do art photography with. I wanted to take odd pictures, especially ones of the industrial areas, again in emulation of Tom, who had an urban-industrial aesthetic.

  But I always had an uneasy relationship with pictures. I could never figure out what I was trying to do with photography. Landscape photography in particular: Oh, it’s a pretty sunset. Oh, that’s a pretty rock formation. Who the fuck cares? I’d come to associate it with what I perceived as my mother’s obsession with appearances—her dictating what I wore to school, her constant fussing with the decoration of our house, her shame about having kids who were different from her friends’ kids, the general barrenness of worrying so much about surfaces. A persistent fantasy I had throughout my late teens and twenties was that I was being followed with a camera, and that people who hadn’t respected me enough, girls who hadn’t wanted me, would see where I was now and be impressed. It was an awful reverie, because I could feel, even as I was having it, that it was an inheritance of that obsession with surfaces.

  In the spring of my junior year in Europe, Tom had come over and traveled with me, and when we were in Milan his movie camera was stolen. By the following Christmas, it was clear that he wasn’t going to get a new one. He’d given up filmmaking, and I now had the burden and the opportunity to be the family artist. And, specifically, to be a writer, given my disenchantment with images.

  INTERVIEWER

  Is that obsession with appearances still a concern to you?

  FRANZEN

  Exhibitionism is a problem for any writer. The craving for an audience, coupled with the shame of exposing yourself to it. This is stuff that I was always tormented by and have been working through as recently as in Freedom.

  But I had all the clues I needed in Germany, in Nietzsche: “Everything that is deep loves the mask.” The Twenty-Seventh City is one big mask. And the long-term ambition for all my work has been to find better and better masks—to find the means to make visible and feelable the unsayable things inside me.

  INTERVIEWER

  How did you accomplish it?

  FRANZEN

  I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer. To write about what was really going on in me with respect to my parents, with respect to my wife, with respect to my sense of self, with respect to my masculinity—there was just no way I could bring that to the surface. I’d tried writing about it directly in short stories before I got going with The Twenty-Seventh City, and I just hadn’t had the chops to get at it, didn’t have enough distance on it, didn’t understand it well enough. So I put on the mask of a middle-aged postmodern writer.

  Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very compromised sense of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to the brain—this was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had been drummed into me by my dad: “You are smarter than most people.” He felt himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me, many times, “Don’t make the mistake I made.” So I set a lot of store in being brainy. And satire was particularly appealing, because, first, it was funny, and I always liked to be funny, and, second, you didn’t have to take responsibility for generating your own faith, your own core beliefs. You could simply expose the mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way for the baby of his family—who’d been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male presences—to exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, no less important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. During those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been made sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. I’d seen firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put a woman in the hospital! So it’s really no wonder that intellect presented itself as a safer alternative in The Twenty-Seventh City.

  In the later books, as I began to put the worst of my own Sons and Lovers psychodramas behind me, I reached for different kinds of masks. The reason it took so long to do Freedom was that the masks not only had to be extremely lifelike but also had to be invented out of whole cloth, because, again, after much trying and failing, I’d seen that there was no way I could write directly about certain central parts of my own experience, my experience with my mom and my experience in my marriage. What made direct revelation impossible was partly my sense of shame and partly a wish to protect third parties, but it was mostly because the material was so hot that it deformed the writing whenever I came at it directly. And so, layer by layer, I built up the masks. Like with papier-mâché, strip after strip, molding ever more lifelike features, in order to perform the otherwise unperformable personal drama.

  INTERVIEWER

  The mask is a way to convey truth, rather than to conceal it.

  FRANZEN

  Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that the amorphous, unconscious, naked soul is a horror. The most terrifying scene in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is the one in which Malte, as a boy, starts putting on party masks from a trunk in his family’s attic, one after another, until finally one of them takes control of him. He sees his masked self in the mirror and goes momentarily insane with terror that there is no him, there’s only the mask. Years la
ter, as an adult, walking around in Paris, he sees a woman on a park bench who puts her face in her hands and then looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her hands. Malte is essentially the story of a young writer working through a fear of masks to a recognition of their necessity.

  Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight that there is no personality, there are just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed by upbringing. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in positing a nullity behind all that. It’s not a nullity, it’s something raw and frightening and bottomless. It’s what Murakami goes looking for in the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. To ignore it is to deny your humanity.

  INTERVIEWER

  The development of the American writer today most typically takes place within the university, in creative-writing programs. Did you consider that route?

  FRANZEN

  I got married instead to a tough reader with great taste. We had our own little round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This phase of our marriage went on for about six years, which is three times longer than the usual program. Plus, we didn’t have to deal with all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate.

  We did actually apply to some programs one year, in hopes of getting a university to support us financially, and we were both accepted at Brown. But the money Brown offered wasn’t good enough. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t go, because it might have smoothed some kinks out of the work that were better not smoothed out. As a journalist, I’m always striving to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.

  INTERVIEWER

  Did you devise another kind of program for yourselves? Did you go to readings?

  FRANZEN

  No, we didn’t want to be around other writers. In some semiconscious way, we recognized that we weren’t good yet, and we needed to protect ourselves from depressing exposure to people who’d already gotten to be good.

  INTERVIEWER

  What books were you reading in those years?

  FRANZEN

  Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.

  But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. This was very straightforwardly and explicitly the program with The Twenty-Seventh City, to take the well-defended Probst and strip away and strip away.

  INTERVIEWER

  And you saw Martin Probst as a parallel to Joseph K.?

  FRANZEN

  Yes, in my own vulgar reading of Kafka, I did. Suddenly one day, for no reason, there were a bunch of Indians in St. Louis, and they were conspiring to ruin Probst’s life.

  INTERVIEWER

  I recall reading that you labored over the beginning of The Twenty-Seventh City—wrote and rewrote it—and then wrote the final stages—

  FRANZEN

  Most of the book.

  INTERVIEWER

  Most of the book, quite quickly.

  FRANZEN

  I’d started by working for months and months on the first chapter, which was about Probst walking his dog and thinking with culpably extreme satisfaction about his accomplishments. I poured countless hours into very purple sentences describing the beauty of the light in Webster Groves, my hometown, on a late weekday afternoon. It was a chapter that ended with the death of the dog. It was terribly overwritten.

  INTERVIEWER

  What do you mean by overwritten?

  FRANZEN

  Trying to do too much with a sentence. I was very much still under the spell of the Germans. You can do things in German with sentence structure that are less advisable in English—pack in all sorts of syntactical elements before the final verb. I was playing with language and with the possibilities of sound, although not so much with alliteration. I’d read Rabbit, Run at a certain point and spent a couple of weeks being highly alliterative before coming to my senses and realizing that not only was my alliteration bad, Updike’s was, too.

  I was doing a lot of punning, though. I was very attached at that young age to pure linguistic play, and blissfully unaware of how it might all read. I thought the concept of my book, the unfolding of a conspiracy, ought to be strong enough to drag the reader through any amount of linguistic playfulness.

  I was reaching; I was writing about stuff I didn’t really know anything about and trying to incorporate every scrap of information and interesting observation I’d ever had. I would write as many pages as I could in a day. I once wrote seventeen pages in a day. And those seventeen pages are in the finished book. When I got rolling, my determination to get the book done and have it be good and get it published was so strong that I had limitless energy. The finished manuscript was thirteen hundred pages. I was twenty-five.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’ve said you were writing eight hours a day.

  FRANZEN

  I could do ten sometimes.

  INTERVIEWER

  Even when things weren’t working?

  FRANZEN

  I didn’t have the experience of things not working. I didn’t know enough to know when something wasn’t all that good. The chapters just came clattering out.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m struck by the number of dream sequences in The Twenty-Seventh City.

  FRANZEN

  More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming. John Gardner described novels as “vivid, continuous dreams,” and though I’m not sure Gardner ever wrote a particularly excellent novel, he was right about the notion of the dream. A notion reinforced by my feeling that all of Kafka’s fiction reads like transcribed dreams.

  Most of the dreams in The Twenty-Seventh City were dreams I’d had myself. I wanted their uncanniness because I was trying to write an uncanny book. A book about making strange a familiar place. And the fastest route to uncanniness is to fall asleep and have a dream in which everything is at once familiar and strange. That was the feel I was after in that book: What kind of weird, surreal world have I fallen into here, in the most boring of Midwestern cities?

  If the dreams are falling away in the later books, I’d like to think it’s because I’m getting better at making the book itself the dream. As I become more comfortable with accessing the primary psychic stuff inside me, and finding adequate dramatic vehicles for it, the need for the literal dream probably diminishes.

  INTERVIEWER

  How did you compose the book?

  FRANZEN

  I typed The Twenty-Seventh City on a Silver Reed typewriter. Then I set the book aside for nearly a year while I tried to find an agent. In hindsight, the responses of the top-drawer agents I’d sent it to seem remarkably gracious, although I didn’t experience them that way at the time. Gloria Loomis told me on the phone, with a little laugh, “I’ll get back to you when I’ve read the second—box.”

  That’s when I did a translation of Spring Awakening, and I was working on some short stories again, with no more success
than before. When I struck out with the agents, I called up the only writer I had any personal connection to, Hugh Nissenson, the novelist, and he proceeded to froth at the mouth for an hour about how stupid and corrupt the publishing industry was, and how lazy certain well-known writers were—it was somewhat embittered frothing. Then he asked me, “How long is the book?” And I told him, and he said, “I’m not going to read your book, but I can tell you right now it’s two times too long. You’ve got to go back and cut it by half.” Then he said, “Is there a lot of sex in it? There’s gotta be a lot of sex in it.”

  It was a wonderful gift. I set down the phone and picked up the manuscript, which I hadn’t looked at in eight months, and I said, “My God, there’s two hundred pages that I can cut in half an hour.” I just suddenly saw it. I suddenly made the connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before. That in fact I was not interested in punishing the reader, because I didn’t enjoy being punished myself. If I wanted the book to be read, it needed to move, and so I had to make the cuts to make it move.

  INTERVIEWER

  David Foster Wallace wrote to you in the summer of 1988, after reading The Twenty-Seventh City.

  FRANZEN

  Yes.

  INTERVIEWER

  When did you meet?

  FRANZEN

  I don’t think we succeeded in meeting until 1990. I was away in Europe for a year, and he flaked on our first two appointments to meet, for reasons that became clearer later. It’s a telltale sign of a substance problem when people don’t show up.

  INTERVIEWER

  Was this your first friendship with another writer?

  FRANZEN

  Well, apart from my wife, yes. Around the same time, I also got to know Bill Vollmann, who was living in New York then.

  INTERVIEWER

  And what difference did this make?

  FRANZEN

  It’s all bound up in the story of my marriage, which I really would prefer not to get into here. But, briefly put, it was a very hermetic marriage, and simply to be in conversation with other people who I thought were doing good work—and also to get their take on my marital situation—was huge. Soon after that, I got to know David Means, too. So right around the beginning of the nineties I suddenly had three male writer friends, as opposed to none. And because I was entering a period of radical doubt about the point of writing literary novels, it was an incredible blessing to talk with other people who were ambitious and thoughtful and talented, who were dedicating their lives to trying to write good books.