Lynne Tillman, visiting Hurst Professor in Fiction at Washington University in St. Louis for Fall 2016, speaks with MFA candidate Joel Sherman about writing and visual art, Clint Eastwood and Gregory Peck, fiction and nonfiction, and her latest novel.<\/p>\n
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and two nonfiction books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2014 was a finalist for the National Book Award, and she is currently a Professor at the University at Albany. A new collection of stories, THE COMPLETE MADAME REALISM AND OTHER STORIES<\/em>, has just been published by Semiotext(e). A new novel, <\/span>Men And Apparitions<\/span><\/i>, is forthcoming in 2017.<\/span><\/p>\n Joel Sherman<\/b>: I\u2019m curious to know your thoughts about the relationship between reading and writing, especially when you\u2019re in the middle of working on a project.<\/span><\/p>\n Lynne Tillman<\/b>: I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any writing without reading\u2014there shouldn\u2019t be\u2014but when I\u2019m writing a novel and when I have time to concentrate I really want to stay in the voice of the character, and particularly with contemporary writers, that is, good ones, it\u2019s too easy to be thrown off your own voice; I mean not my voice, the character\u2019s voice, I don\u2019t really think of myself as having <\/span>a <\/span><\/i>voice particularly. So when I\u2019m writing like that I\u2019m thinking about how am I going to figure out this part, or how am I going to write this sentence, and so I\u2019m reading as a writer, to see how other people are doing it, and it\u2019s a little less problematic reading something from longer ago, I would say.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: What about the relationship between writing and the visual arts, particularly with relation to the collection of stories <\/span>This Is Not It<\/span><\/i>, stories inspired by works of other contemporary artists.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: Artists deal with different problems from writers, but the way artists approach what they do opens up ways of thinking about writing, and I am very interested in why they make what they do, and, as a writer who is partial to narrative and my own way of doing it, I begin to think about what\u2019s behind a work, what\u2019s the motivation, how can I represent that in a story. It takes all different forms, sometimes it\u2019s more direct than other times. I wrote a prose piece for Stephen Ellis, who\u2019s in the book, he does abstract painting, but there are referential bits that you can make into objects if you want, and so I was thinking about, what is this painting articulating, and I tried to do that through its own elements, different colors, and I could never do it again. [<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>]<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: It was inspired in the moment by that . . . <\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: The writing is the work, the inspiration is like one percent. The rest is figuring out how to make it into words, what to do with it. It\u2019s like an idea, Einstein might have had the idea about relativity but he had to prove it. It\u2019s the same thing, it\u2019s not a slam dunk.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: It\u2019s a lot of work after the flash.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: That\u2019s right, a lot of, lot of work. That\u2019s what I think non-writers, non-artists, non-scientists don\u2019t understand, that the idea or the inspiration is not the work. There\u2019s a big difference.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: From <\/span>This Is Not It<\/span><\/i>, you read \u201cThe Undiagnosed\u201d at the reading, and afterward an audience member had maybe mistaken it for nonfiction, and later you were telling us that\u2019s happened before, and I\u2019m curious if there\u2019s something about that piece that lends itself to being mistaken for nonfiction. Obviously, it includes a character named Clint Eastwood . . . <\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: I think that\u2019s a big part of it. I wrote a piece, an earlier piece, called \u201cDead Talk,\u201d and it was supposed to be the last day of Marilyn Monroe\u2019s life, and I wrote it in third person and first person, descriptions of her day, and then first person as if her own diary, her thoughts. I remember going around, this was in 1990, going around England reading from it, reading it from a collection of stories, <\/span>Absence Makes the Heart<\/span><\/i>, and everywhere people thought it was me, and even though I\u2019d said Marilyn Monroe, it didn\u2019t seem to matter. I think it\u2019s a mistaken idea that something is truth if it\u2019s actual or that fiction is somehow disingenuous. A so-called true event, which is of course not truth, not necessarily true, is just an event, it can be rendered poorly, inaccurately or without interest. It\u2019s very annoying to me, when fiction writers say about their own work, this is a true story. I say all fiction can be true if it\u2019s well written.<\/span><\/p>\n So, a lot of people thought I had met Clint Eastwood and had that conversation, and I think there\u2019s a desire when it is somebody like Clint Eastwood that we get a little closer to him, we do know him. I watched a documentary last night on my computer about Gregory Peck, and before he died he had a one-man show going around the country showing clips from his movies and talking about his life, and his daughter made a documentary\u2014Barbara Kopple actually directed it\u2014using some of that material and other material, and his desire was that people know that he was a genuine person. It\u2019s a wonderful documentary.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: He\u2019s one of those actors who, for me, he\u2019s so ingrained as Atticus Finch.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: That\u2019s right and he said that was his favorite role, and the person who was called Scout, the little girl, was in one of the audiences, and they remained friends, and she calls him Atticus, and he calls her Scout, still.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: [<\/span>laughing<\/span><\/i>] That\u2019s funny. That might complicate his message a little bit.<\/span><\/p>\n So, assuming both fiction and nonfiction can be true, or can represent truth in a way, as somebody who\u2019s written essays and fictional stories, I\u2019m interested in the different sort of work you see a fictional story doing in the world compared to an essay.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: It\u2019s a hard question. I\u2019d say that when I write what I think of more or less as an essay, it gathers itself around an already existing object. When I write fiction, even though you might say there\u2019s an object, I\u2019m more interested in creating a subjective response, and often there is no object, I\u2019m just inventing something to write about, although everything comes from somewhere. If I\u2019m writing about the presidential election, I\u2019ve just written a couple of essays for my column in <\/span>Frieze Magazine<\/span><\/i> that relate to the election and campaigning, but I didn\u2019t invent Trump, otherwise you could shoot me. [<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>]<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: I find it really impressive how you are able to tackle issues like that in fictional works as well. That\u2019s something that not as many people are doing. From <\/span>Someday This Will Be Funny, <\/span><\/i>the Madame Realism story in that collection, \u201cMadame Realism\u2019s Conscience,\u201d draws on the politics of that time period, and also on past politics\u2014JFK\u2019s a brief character\u2014and you\u2019re able to weave together essayistic elements\u2014in that story jokes also play a central role\u2014in a way that I found fascinating, to be able to do that in a fictional story and also create a narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: So you have a character who is speaking about other characters. I was asked to write a piece for the Albany Museum, the University Museum was doing a show called <\/span>The Presidents<\/span><\/i>, and it was contemporary artists who were working representationally with portraits of presidents, or other ways, say, having to do with the Oval Office, or that kind of power. Madame Realism enabled me to approach this topic, in a fictional way. Using a fictional character, in that way, is a gateway to being able to fictionalize nonfiction, and to nonfictionalize fiction [<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>] or something like that. I think often the problem when writers aren\u2019t effective doing that, it\u2019s about being too heavy handed, and too didactic, and using it only to make a point, and in fiction if you do that it creates just one reading of something. I think one of the Madame Realism stories that was maybe too like that, too directed, was about Haim Steinbach\u2019s work, it\u2019s in <\/span>This Is Not It<\/span><\/i>, and it has to do with high and low, and the reason I thought about that was that Haim Steinbach\u2019s work is about high and low, about putting a kind of ordinary object on a plinth or shelves as a form of sculpture, and he might have three objects on a shelf, and one of them may be just a silly rubber duck or something like that, I don\u2019t think he\u2019s ever done that, and it was this idea of mixing high and low, which was done very strongly by Warhol and pop artists. And Madame Realism goes into a bar and I wrote a kind of mock argument between her and John Hightower, and I\u2019m still not sure if that\u2019s what I should\u2019ve done, but I always like having a character at a bar [<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>] because I like bars and what could happen there, so I think some of it worked.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: Another story I was interested in asking you about, which doesn\u2019t use a sort of direct narrator as intermediary, is \u201cLunacies,\u201d from <\/span>Someday This Will Be Funny<\/span><\/i>, which seems to me one that is also kind of playing on the boundary between . . . <\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: Fiction and nonfiction.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: Right.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: Yes, I wrote that for a book, a book and an art exhibition that Steven Hull developed which had to do with responding to the moon, and I began thinking about lunacy and the moon, and how what\u2019s interesting to me was the idea of trying to be rational about the moon, at the same time that we look up at a glowing full moon, or a half moon, and can\u2019t help sometimes but see it in an irrational way, and it does look like it has a face, [<\/span>laughs<\/span><\/i>] and it may never stop looking like it has a face. So that\u2019s an interesting question for me about the human desire to have a subjective, irrational or imaginative response to something. While we know about the moon scientifically now, information you can\u2019t challenge, but that we still want to. So that\u2019s how I wrote that story, using different facts about the moon juxtaposed to stories of lunacy.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: I first encountered that in a class on microfiction, it was excerpted in <\/span>Short<\/span><\/i>, an anthology of flash fiction, and I was curious about, for someone who has written some very short stories and also many novels, your approach to scale in writing. I guess I\u2019m curious when you start to work on a project, do you often or ever have an idea of the scale of what it\u2019s going to become or is that something that grows out of the writing process?<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: I think with novels I know I want to be writing a novel. When you write a novel you\u2019re working with several ideas that are, at least to your way of thinking, large ideas that can\u2019t be contained in one story; although Kafka\u2019s \u201cA Hunger Artist\u201d is sometimes talked about as a novel and some short stories that I\u2019ve read and some that I\u2019ve written seem to me to be a whole world and not just a kind of episode or incident. So this most recent novel that I just finished, <\/span>Men And Apparitions<\/span><\/i>, I knew what I wanted to do, I knew it was a novel. I consider myself first and foremost a novelist, because that\u2019s what I like to do best, to develop a longer argument, a longer work with big ideas, that I think are big, and figure out how to narrate them. So for instance with <\/span>American Genius, A Comedy<\/span><\/i> that came about when I started thinking about sensitivity, and how Americans are sensitive about everything and yet we invaded Iraq, so from sensitivity, how do you tell that story? Then I wanted to talk about America\u2014at first I was just going to call it \u201cAmerican Skin\u201d but that did not describe it, and really limited it, but skin is used as a trope throughout the novel. It is the biggest organ of the body, it contracts and expands, so the novel goes from small things, like talking about dry skin on a part of your body, to big things, like the US Constitution to art of the early Twentieth Century to inaugural addresses to Kafka. It talks about a lot of stuff, and I\u2019m trying to expand and contract the novel, going from the little to the big, or from the individual to the group or the nation. <\/span><\/p>\n With <\/span>Men And Apparitions<\/span><\/i>, the novel I just finished, I do a lot of thinking about visual art and photography and culture in general. We\u2019re living in a time, everybody has been saying this for at least 40 years, we\u2019re living in a glut of images, which is almost so common as not to be said anymore, and the glut has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and I thought, well, how do you narrate that? How do you tell the story of a glut of images, living in a glut of images? I figured out a way but it took me years, and first I wrote a short story for something else, and I was interested in the character, this young guy who was an anthropologist, and I thought, I\u2019m going to use him, and it got more and more complicated and conceptually, structurally, it was very hard to figure out how to do. There\u2019s a lot of expository material, a lot of what you would call nonfiction, written from his point of view and in his voice. He\u2019s an ethnographer and he\u2019s also interested in the history of photography, and he\u2019s thinking about what an image is. He\u2019s done two books on family photographs, and inside mine I did a nonfiction, another book, which is supposed to be Zeke\u2019s book, his name is Ezekiel, Zeke\u2019s book of men. He\u2019s 38, and he\u2019s interested in the age group of about 25-45, men born under the sign of feminism, after the women\u2019s movement, and I wanted to know, being friends with a lot of such guys, how do they think they\u2019re different from their fathers. So I sent out an email questionnaire, to about 25-30 people, and I said it\u2019s all going to be anonymous, and I\u2019m going to be quoting. So they are quotes from people, and the book is called, the book within the book, is called <\/span>Men In Quotes<\/span><\/i>. That\u2019s going to be the appendix, so you\u2019re going to finish the novel, so to speak, and then there\u2019s this other.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: And that\u2019s his entire book?<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: Wow, and that\u2019s where the quotes would appear.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: That\u2019s right.<\/span><\/p>\n JS<\/b>: I\u2019m assuming also you probably did research on ethnography and the history of photography.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: I sat in on a graduate course in the history of photography, I write about photography, and I\u2019d also been reading stuff over the years, and also I was a graduate student in sociology, so I started studying cultural anthropology then and read more and became really interested in that. So I had some background, and then I added to it. <\/span><\/p>\n JS:<\/b> That sounds really great.<\/span><\/p>\n LT<\/b>: Keeping this thing up in the air was juggling more balls than I\u2019ve ever juggled before. 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