What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (16 page)

LT:
In that sense, the author has always been dead.

HM:
That’s right. There’s never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers.

LT:
Your most recent novel
Cigarettes
seems formally very different from, let’s say, your first novel
The Conversions
, although it seemed to me that
Cigarettes
reworks some of
The Conversions
’ themes.

HM:
The earlier works were misread by a great many readers because they always thought I must be doing something else than what was actually there. And so they kept looking past what was right in front of them. One doesn’t have to look for symbols, one doesn’t have to look for explanations. You don’t need to explain those early books either. I think they are very up front. And one way that they’re up front is in the terrific unspoken or apparently unspoken drama that goes on in the life of the narrator, one which is barely indicated but always present. The narrator makes only two or three remarks in the course of
The Conversions
—about his wife divorcing him, for instance—but they’re enough to suggest
all the things that he’s not saying that he should be saying. You can’t help being aware, even if you don’t know why, that the narrator has been reduced to a point of total fearfulness.

LT:
His pursuit of the inheritance, which sets him chasing fragments of an esoteric puzzle that, in fact, doesn’t exist, has all sorts of meanings. He’s on a quest, a journey. Is he worthy, is he smart enough? A lot of anxiety there.

HM:
John Ashbery was one reader who understood this straight off. Many people thought I was being too clever by miles, that I was playing games or just showing off or I don’t know what, indulging in a display of erudition. And that really isn’t the point at all. All the erudition gets blown up; it all turns out to have no significance whatsoever. In
The Conversions
there’s really only one character; the drama you get of one character who can’t or doesn’t dare tell about himself. I myself find this drama all the more moving by being so painfully, so inadequately expressed.

LT:
Which is where your work reminds me of Jane Bowles’
Two Serious Ladies
. In fact, Phoebe, the troubled young woman in
Cigarettes
, asks her father to read to her from
Two Serious Ladies
. I know that people talk about your work mostly in relation to Roussel. . .

HM:
I’m delighted to hear it. I read
Two Serious Ladies
three times and I don’t know how she did it. She achieves miracles by just putting one ordinary sentence after the other and she never indicates
the way you’re supposed to feel about it. That’s something which I certainly hold as a model in my writing, but I got that more from Roussel than I did from her.

LT:
That “not indicating the way you’re supposed to feel about it” is why I think of you in relation to Jane Bowles. How would you describe
Cigarettes
to somebody who hadn’t yet read it, or what would you say your project was when you started it?

HM:
I had several things I wanted to do. For one thing, I promised myself not to do anything I’d already done in my earlier books. No erudition, no language games. The texture is very clear and if you took each chapter by itself, it would seem very conventional in style. I also wanted the book to be both traditional and modern. I had, almost from the very start, a desire to portray a passionate friendship between two middle-aged women—the friendship between Elizabeth and Maud at the end of the book. In a way, the whole book leads to that.

LT:
The portrait painted of Elizabeth by Walter Trale, another character, is so important in the novel. She is at the center and her portrait is a kind of centerpiece.

HM:
Actually, the painted portrait doesn’t turn out to be very significant.

LT:
But it has meaning in relation to people’s lives.

HM:
It does but it’s just a thing ultimately and it’s the characters who lay a lot of significance on it. I think it’s tempting for readers to do that too. Some people who have written about the book are tempted to see in the portrait a symbol of something mysterious. I think it’s symbolic of an object just being an object.

LT:
In the novel it seems to be important not because it’s essentially important, but because different people desire it, copy it, try to destroy it. It floats through the text as a kind of signifier.

HM:
That’s true. It’s a signifier without any signified beyond itself. It has no metaphysical significance of any kind at all. It plays an important role in terms of the narrative. It’s a kind of bait for the expectation, for the desire to find significance. In the end it’s just hanging on the terrace being a painting, we recognize its role to be purely narrative and nothing more than that. In a way the portrait is like the huge cultural constructs in my early books, you know in musicology or in art history or theology—they all turn out to be so much hot air. Of course between the opening chapters and the final chapter the portrait serves to remind us of Elizabeth herself, whom we’ve only known through her effect on three of the male characters. The reader, whether admitting it or not, has probably read the table of contents and seen that the last chapter is called “Maud and Elizabeth.” The reader knows after Elizabeth disappears that she’s going to come back.

LT:
All of the chapters present characters in pairs; each one gets paired with others in different chapters. You date some chapters
1936, and some 1963, which is the reverse of 36. I liked the structure very much; it underscores what things mean in relation to each other and in time.

HM:
That’s very good. I had general ideas about what I wanted to do, but I had no idea what the book was going to look like. I had invented a design that amounted to a series of empty spaces to fill up. I stared at these empty spaces for two years, watching them fill up, watching them turn into a whole. The story gets told, but it is never told. Whatever it may be, the story of the novel isn’t told, just these other stories of the particular relationships.

LT: Cigarettes
is not only about relationships in a very direct way, but things that have tremendous impact on relationships, like money. Money moves through the text and interrupts lives in very different and fascinating ways. Who inherits it? Do you give it away? Do you squander it? Do you invest it? This too reminded me of
The Conversions
—the hero’s quest for the immense fortune. So I wanted to talk about money.

HM:
Oh dear, really? I don’t have much to say about money that isn’t in the book. I guess if I had to say something general about money, it would be that it’s completely empty, it has no meaning in it itself, no significance. It’s simply in reactions people have to it that it acquires an apparent role. It has no inherent power.

LT:
It’s used that way in your novel, Maud giving it to her daughter and then taking it back and then giving it again.

HM:
And the father giving it to the daughter, giving it and taking it back. Elizabeth, who’s obviously been through her share of thin spells (she’s broke at the time she meets Maud), finds it totally silly that Maud should get so upset about this. “You’re making a problem out of a million dollars”—a million pre-war dollars. For somebody like Elizabeth, and Irene too, money’s just something to get when you need it and use for what you need. For the others, money matters to them in some way, it’s involved in how they define life as having value or not. Maud isn’t a bad person at all, she’s a gentle, generous and warm person whom Elizabeth manages to bring out of her state of perpetual reluctance. She’s not mean, but nevertheless, she does things which she then bitterly regrets.

LT:
I thought that the way in which money figured in people’s lives, people with money worrying about money in some way. . .

HM:
It’s an American hang up, I think.

LT:
This is your most American novel, I thought.

HM:
It’s not the point of the novel at all. But I suppose socially that’s true, in so far as it’s a depiction of a social milieu.

LT:
The novel talks about the meanness, cruelty of people. For instance, Owen is going to discover Allan’s insurance fraud. For pleasure. It’s a game to him. In your earlier books it looks like games play people, and in
Cigarettes
it’s people who play games.

HM:
They think they are. It’s interesting what happens in connection with Owen’s game. It actually cures Allan of his criminality, not because it frightens him, but because he’d finally been caught—appreciated. Owen may turn out to be smarter than Allan is, but at least Owen has gone to a lot of trouble to untangle these very smart frauds that Allan set up and that he’s never been able to tell anybody about. Owen acts like a tough macho knocking off another guy and showing him who’s boss, but he ends up doing Allan a great favor. Allan gives up this whole secret fraudulent career that he’s been pursuing for totally inadequate reasons. At least the reasons he gives sound unconvincing.

LT:
Characters in
Cigarettes are
motivated to do things but there’s no explanation as to
why
they’re doing these things.

HM:
They certainly don’t seem to know why they’re doing them.

LT:
Maybe Allan wants to be discovered, wants attention, needs to be bad, those kinds of things, and yet that’s too reductive, really.

HM:
To go back to your very first question: How does allowing the reader to be the creator work? I could say that the reader has to bring his or her experience to bear to supply an explanation, has to invent some way of accepting these characters and their behavior.

LT:
The characters Morris Romsen, the art critic, and Lewis, the would-be writer, have, in
Cigarettes
, a physical sado-masochistic
relationship that parallels, in my mind, the relationship of Allan and Owen in which the two men are playing elaborate games with each other that mean, somehow, affection and attention.

HM:
I always love to have people find parallels like that. You mentioned earlier that 63 was the reverse of 36. This is news to me, and I’m sure that one could discover an interesting numerical system going throughout the entire book which would also be news to me. It reminds me of my great friend Georges Perec’s explanation of
Tlooth
, my second novel. When he translated it into French, he imagined a semantic palindrome running through it. That is to say, some kind of hidden series of statements that could be read forwards and backwards and that he thought determined the course of the book. One piece of evidence he produced was a switch of the letters “m” and “n” in one chapter:
bombe ato
n
ique
(a soporific spray) and for
m
ication (meaning ant activity). I told him, you’re absolutely right. But I had been totally unaware of doing this. Things like that make me feel that whatever I’m doing must be right, at least as it allows this kind of connections or similarities to manifest themselves. That’s a sign there’s a whole lot of thought going on of which I’m unaware.

LT: Tlooth
seemed the most overtly political of all your works, with its sects, groups, with Jacksongrad being the name of the camp, like a play on Stalingrad, or on a concentration camp or a gulag. But the book begins with a baseball game that also places it in and refers to the United States, spreading the political spectrum left and right.

HM:
I’m sure politics is at least implicitly involved, but really the substratum of those first three novels is a religious one. Obviously, in
The Conversions
where there’s a sort of white goddess legend. She’s black actually but it’s still a matriarchal goddess cult. But even in
Tlooth
religion is lurking in all the corners.

LT:
The names of the sects, Fideist, Americanist, Defective Baptist, Resurrectionist.

HM:
That’s right. Elsewhere there are various forms of Christianity, including the Nestorian heresy, which is described in the chapter “Spires and Squares.” And then in
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
, my third novel, there is Buddhism as well as Catholicism. Certainly politics are present too—it was the middle of the ’60s, after all.

LT:
I thought about religion in regard to
Tlooth
and then in relation to your work generally. I began to think you were saying that faith in language, as a way to communicate, is like faith in religion. That you have to believe in language, you have faith that you can communicate, even if you’re not really able to communicate, as you have in a religion.

HM:
I’m very moved by that. Did you know that was how Perec felt?

LT:
Really?

HM:
I’m glad to know that I ultimately agree with him, having had many arguments with him about the question of how communication actually works in language, of whether communication is possible at all. For Perec, writing was a kind of salvation. It was justification by works. You know that expression, much discussed during the Reformation? And Perec, I think that if he hadn’t felt that writing was a vocation in the absolute sense of the word, a calling, like a priest, he would have died even sooner that he did.

LT:
When did he die?

HM:
In 1982.

LT:
Perec was, like you, a member of the OuLiPo. Could you say what it is and give its history?