Hi folks,
BENOIT
LELIEVRE INTERVIEW ON THE RAPIST
Benoit conducts some of the best interviews on
the planet and it was a privilege to be asked to sit down with him and chat. Gotta warn you--Benoit presented this in four parts because of the length and it's presented en toto here.
Question: Rapists
are the most abhorred criminals in our society, next to paedophiles. What
motivated you to write a first person narrative about one of them in your
latest novel? Why did you decide to give a rapist a voice?
Response:
I have to warn you—my answers aren’t going to be politically correct and I’m
going to piss some people off.
First,
it was never my goal to give rapists a “voice,” at least not in any significant
way. I think of rapists pretty much as most folks do—as almost totally
reprehensible beings. In fact, I don’t see it as a book about rapists at all,
but rather a book about time and space and God and human beings. I thought
about naming it The Memoir of Jesus
Christ but didn’t as that would take away the power of the last line, which
is what the book is really about. I did and do fully expect most people to see
it as a book about rape and a rapist and prison and all that stuff, but there
will be a few who I think will see it for what it was intended to be which is a
book about the universe and God and how human beings fit in there and how it’s
really all fucked up and there’s not much we can do about it. I don’t want too
many of those folks, though. I hope most won’t be able to “get that.” If many
did, I wouldn’t have achieved what I set out to do. The people I really respect
and who I wrote it for—people such as Cort McMeel—understood it immediately and that pleases me to no end. Just about every one
of the 31 blurbers got it perfectly and it’s those kinds of people I wrote it
for. I would never write something intended for everybody. I write for my
spiritual and intellectual twin and like most of us, don’t have many of those.
I wrote it for Cort and I wrote it for Charles Bukowski and people like that. I didn’t even send it
out for publication for over twenty-five years (wrote it in the late eighties)
as I was pretty sure it didn’t fit any commercial guidelines. I just kept it in
a drawer until the right guy came along. That guy was Jon Bassoff of New Pulp Press.
There are others I would have happily published it with, like Allan Guthrie or Brian Lindenmuth,
but Jon was the best for this book, I felt.
The
idea for his book came from a Charles Bukowski short story, “The Fiend.” It is
the most powerful, most honest, and most profound story I’ve ever read. The
instant I finished it, I knew then that to write a story this courageous would
be the best thing I could ever do and I also knew I would have as hard a time
in finding an audience for it as he did for his work before the Germans
discovered him and published him when America wouldn’t. In fact, I didn’t even
consider a U.S. publisher until I met Jon. I always thought it would find a
home some day with a French publisher. It’s a French book, you know.
Intellectually. Perhaps Russian. The Russia of two centuries ago, not today.
What
Bukowski did in that story was, to use an overworked word that in this case is
precisely correct; brilliant. He took
that person you spoke of at the top—the odious pedophile—and showed through his
literary, insightful, particular genius
that no matter what depths a person has sunk to (or risen to), he is still one
of us. He is still human, no matter how grotesque and misshapen and evil his
mind is. In this story, he wrote the single most illuminating line that has
ever been written in literature. I’m not even going to use a qualifier for that
statement such as “in my opinion.” It is just simply the clearest sentence ever
written in literature. An early line in
the story, spoken by the protagonist Martin as he is kissing the child, just
before he rapes her, and the narrator says, “Martin’s eyes looked into her eyes and it was a communication between
two hells--one hers, the other his.” When I read this line, it was as if
I’d been struck by literary lightening.
Bukowski reached out from beyond the grave and touched me with his hand with
those words and I knew then what I had to write.
And, that’s how The Rapist
came to be. My effort to write something as stark and honest and true as
Bukowski had.
And, he’d already taken a
“short eyes” as the character for his story, so all that was really left was a
rapist. Never considered a serial killer or mass murderer as a character—most
are really boring—all they do is keep repeating the same-o, same-o until they’re
caught.
The rape and the trial and
all that are only the window dressing. It’s really a novel of how I see the
universe. It’s a story about a God who is omniscient, but who is also really old, and has all of the infirmities of
age. After all, he made us in his image, according to the text, and I presume
that means he endowed us with all of the same things as he himself is endowed
with, including frailties and shortcomings along with all the strengths. It a
novel explaining how time and space work. It’s chronological and at the same
time, it’s not. It’s here and it’s there and it’s somewhere else that we can’t
see because God hasn’t allowed us to see yet. It’s forever and ever and has
always existed and it hasn’t yet begun and it’s already ended and that implies
a circle. I see it as a ball of yarn, not of one continuous strand, but
composed of countless strands, all woven together. It’s the past, the present
and the future, all happening at once and yet not. It’s about a definition of
time that we don’t yet possess, beyond the three most recognize.
What really struck me
during the editing is that the copy editor, Alice Riley, got what I was trying
to do. She pointed out that I vacillated between present and simple past and
perfect past tense and wanted to know if that was on purpose as she suspected
it was. Because of the time element, you see? It told me that she got it. That
was an exciting moment for me. Most copy editors I’ve worked with probably
wouldn’t have. They get the grammar and the spelling and syntax and all that
stuff, but they often don’t really get the literature.
She got that it wasn’t intended to be a chronological story at all. That the
“parts” weren’t meant to fit neatly. They were like the pieces of string the
old man explained to Truman on the mountaintop. I hope I get some readers like
Alice. She understood that this was one of an unlimited number of memoirs that
Jesus wrote. Is still writing. Hasn’t written yet. And, that he, like his
father, got the pieces of time string mixed up sometimes. After all, they’re
the same guy. That the parts that are mixed up are from the pen of the third
party of the triune—the Holy Ghost. That poor guy never gets to get on stage,
so I gave him some lines.
Tried to show that God
had/has/will have a sense of humor. Probably a French sense of humor…
One more thing about
Bukowski that I thought of because of something you said in your question. That
first-person thing. I thought that while his story was the bravest thing I’ve
ever read, he kind of copped a deuce with it. In almost all of his work, he
writes from the first-person pov. In “The Fiend” he uncharacteristically
employs a third person. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a third-person story
from Bukowski other than this one. I think he got nervous at the last and wrote
it in third because he was afraid someone would think he had that pedophile,
hidden somewhere deep inside him, and he didn’t want people to ever think that
about him. Because he didn’t. But, I think he was afraid that he might be viewed
that way. I think maybe he saw what happened to Nabokov with Humbert Humbert where Nabokov had to come out and make public
proclamations that, no, he wasn’t hiding a little Humbert deep down inside that
he drew from, and Bukowski didn’t want people to think the same kinds of things
about him about his character Martin. I decided I’d use first-person for that
reason. It’s like Bukowski and I had one of those bar fights he was famous for
and this was my secret weapon to knock him out. It’s the brass knucks I hid
from him and brought out when he wasn’t looking. And, since he’s room
temperature and can’t do anything about it, I can claim I won.
Question: Tell us
about the long, hard road to publication for THE RAPIST
. I'm sure finding it a home wasn't
easy at all.
Well, it was and it wasn’t.
It was infinitely easier to find a publisher for this than it was for my first
novel, The Death of Tarpons, which collected 86
rejections before it found a home. And, that was by accident… On the right desk
at the right time—the only five minute period it could have been there and been
read. And that book won literary awards, which always makes me wonder about
editor’s and agent’s acumen… As does THE RAPIST. I mean, it got 31 blurbs from some
of the best writers in the world and yet not a single Legacy 6 editor wanted
it? Okay…
I most likely would have
found a home for it years before I did, but you have to send it out for that to
happen. I wrote it over 25 years ago and it’s sat in a drawer, metaphorically,
until now. I just didn’t think a U.S. publisher would see it as publishable. In
the back of my mind, I kept thinking that once I got “established” (whatever
that is), that I’d have work translated and through that I could interest a foreign
publisher in it. I’ve always thought it fit the French mind better than
anyone’s.
When I found myself in the
MFA program at Vermont College, my last-semester advisor
was Dr. Francois Camoin, a bona fide Frenchman. And, a bona fide literary genius. He was the first
person I’d ever showed it to. He read it and then we had a drink together. He
told me it was one of the most brilliant things he’d ever read, but that he
felt I’d have trouble finding a publisher. He delivered the same exact thought
that I had always had. He said he didn’t think it fit the sensibility of the
American reader. He felt they were more attuned to Stephen King and John
Grisham and the like and just wouldn’t “get it.” Too dark. Too intellectual. He
went on to say that he thought though that someday if I got lucky I would find
a publisher—like me, he thought it would be a European publisher—and that, even
though it would be hard to get it published, once it was he predicted it would
win all kinds of awards.
Well, over the years since then,
I showed it to a few people. Mostly whoever was my agent at the time. The thing
is, most agents—even though they’re nice folks, usually—are pretty much attuned
to the top of their quality scale being commercial stuff like James Patterson,
and none of them understood the book. So, I stuck it back into that drawer. And
then, I became friends with a guy who I think has the best literary mind of
anyone I’ve been privileged to meet. A guy named Cort McMeel. It took a lot by
that time for me to trust anyone. Certainly not an agent! Most of them—while
being nice people—could just as easily be selling Florsheim shoes—they’re
salesmen and like the Ford salesman mostly want to move the latest car that’s
hot. There really are no more Maxwell Perkins out there… That’s not a bad thing
and agents aren’t bad people. They’re just not the sort of people you want in
charge of something that’s intellectual, as a rule. That’s a type of product
that’s outside their familiarity and comfort zone. They don’t want to represent
Camus—they want to represent James Patterson.
Anyway, for the first time
since Dr. Camoin, I met someone who I felt had a genuine literary mind. So I
asked him if he wanted to read it. You’ll have to read the foreword which Cort
graciously provided for the book to see how that went.
But… well. It went well. He
loved it. In fact, he wanted to publish it under the imprint he’d just begun,
Bare Knuckles Press. And, we had a deal until he ended his association with the press. Without
Cort, I ended my own association with it. And, I happened on a new publisher.
New Pulp Press. I chanced on a book of theirs that just blew me away. Jake
Hinkson’s Hell on Church Street. Blew me fucking away. I went to their list and went down the row and read
every single book publisher Jon Bassoff had published. Not a single clunker in
the bunch. Not one! I know of no
other publisher who has the record Jon does. Probably Allan Guthrie—don’t think
he has a single book that isn’t brilliant. And Brian Lindenmuth. But, nobody
had it like Jon did. That’s the guy I wanted to publish this book and it’s
because of who he had already published. It was clear he was a guy who could
read silently without moving his lips. He wasn’t much interested in moving
Florsheim or Stacy-Adams shoes to make a buck… He actually understands and
loves literature. Kind of a contemporary John Martin. I’m so glad I found him. And, like Martin, he even designed my cover himself.
Damn—he really is John Martin!
I sent it to Jon, he liked
it and he’s publishing it. I’m as happy as a clam before the clam learns
there’s a thing called clam sauce… Pretty fucking happy… I’m hoping he likes
two other works of mine he has on his desk and will want to publish them as
well.
Question: I think
most of Dead End Follies' readers understand the purpose of true,
groundbreaking shock value in fiction and THE RAPIST has a mouthful of it. What
are the novels that shocked you and redefined your boundaries as an artist?
Great
question! First and foremost, Camus’ The
Stranger has influenced me more than any other single work. One of the
biggest things that struck me was how absolutely perfect it was. I think Camus
practiced Eastern philosophy upon it as he wrote it. That trope about how you
always include a small imperfection in any art form so that you don’t challenge
God. There’s a tiny imperfection in it, but I haven’t been able to find it yet.
I keep looking though, because if it is, indeed, perfect, we may as well all
give up as what we’re after has been attained and that makes it a second-place
thing and who wants that?
Second,
there are a handful of novels that taught me how to write a novel. At least the
kind of novel I wanted to write. Among those, I count Killshot
by Elmore Leonard, A Feast of Snakes
by Harry Crews, any and all of the
collections of short stories by Ray Carver
, and The Last Good Kiss
by James Crumley. Most of Faulkner’s novels. More than any other novel or book
though, has been the King James version of the Bible. It’s the basis for just
about everything we experience in our culture, even for the agnostics and
atheists. It’s where our civilization comes from. I don’t know how anyone can
pretend to know who they are if they don’t know the Bible. Doesn’t matter if
you believe what it says or not. I’m not talking much about the religion in it
in terms of its value. It’s the other things. The cadence of the poetry, for
example.
None
of these “shocked” me in any sense of the common definition. I can’t think of
any book that has ever done that. I’ve seen things in my life that are beyond
anything I’ve ever read in a book. I’ll give you an early example. When I was
12, I had already been working in my grandmother’s bar and restaurant ever
since I could remember. It was a rough bar, what you’d call a honky-tonk, and I
saw pretty much everything you can think of in such a place. On my 12th
birthday, Grandma thought it was time I learned her cab business, so she
appointed me the night dispatcher. On my first night on the job, it was a slow
night and the cabbies were all gathered outside the little shack where my phone
and clipboard and assignment sheet and all that stuff was. My little desk and
chair. Well, they got to screwing around after awhile and one of them found a
dead rattlesnake—or maybe it was alive and he killed it—I don’t know. Anyway,
he started waving it at another driver who didn’t know it was dead, and he was
terrified of rattlers and kept telling the guy to keep that snake off him, but
the other guy thought it was funny and kept tormenting him. Finally, the guy
with the snake threw it at the scared guy and that man pulled out a pistol and
shot him in the throat. About six feet away from me. Blood spurted everywhere
and I got my share of it on me. Since I was the dispatcher, it was my job to
call the cops, which I did. That was in the days before 911, so I had to get
the phone book out, look up the number, and dial it and then tell the cops what
had happened. All without looking like some kind of pussy kid. Later, I was
called to the witness stand to tell what I’d seen. After you see something like
that, what can be in a book that will shock you? Pretty much nothing. And,
there’ve been lots and lots of experiences like that and far worse. So, I don’t
anticipate ever reading anything in a book that will shock me in that way.
BTW,
the guy was acquitted and left town immediately. The dead guy had a lot of
friends and relatives who didn’t like what had happened.
That
same year I got whipped bloody by my father with a live king snake and I tried
to kill a group of older Mexican kids with a .38 I stole from a sporting goods
store when they attacked me and my best friend down on a submerged barge down
at the Brazos River by the shrimp docks. Witnessed a lynching in a way. By that
I mean I was present when the sheriff was notified on the phone in our bar and
knew from what he said what was going down. Remember watching him eat another
piece of pie with tiny bites after he got the call and told us what was
happening and how when he finally left to go “stop” them, he drove away at
about five miles an hour. How you gonna stay down on the farm once you’ve seen
Paree? By which, I mean how are you going to shock me with lines in a book?
What
those books did was shock me with their beauty and with their power. Their ability
to show a deep understanding of the human heart and the human soul. They gave
me a standard to shoot for and one that I knew wouldn’t be easy to attain.
I
have to take it back. I did read a book that shocked me and I just remembered
it. A collection of Bukowski’s stories. TheMost Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories. It wasn’t the content that shocked me. The content was just about drunks
and whores and stuff like I knew about since I was little. It was learning that
the kind of stuff I wanted to write could be published. I had just assumed it
couldn’t be because I’d never read anything like he wrote. He didn’t write
anything very shocking, compared to real life. That it could become published;
that was what was shocking. And liberating. And sad. Sad, that I was in my
thirties before I found out the free society I thought I had been living in,
wasn’t. That there was censorship everywhere and had been going on for a long
time. Bukowski is the primary person who opened up the boundaries wide for me as
a writer.
Thanks,
Chuck.
Question: You made
no secret that you've had a hard life. In fact, you seem pretty candid about
it. How has it brought you to writing? What made you sit down and write
seriously for the first time?
It’s
the other way around, Benoit. It’s writing that brought me to a hard life, for
the most part. I’ve actively sought out the dangerous places in life and for
one reason—material for my writing. It’s only when you’re close to death that
you come fully alive.
I
sat down and began to write seriously when I was around four or five years old.
Immediately after I was able to read the first book on my own, I decided at
that moment that being a writer was the only thing I ever wanted to do and I
haven’t wavered one iota from that moment. At that time, I thought I could
write a better book than what I’d just read. I couldn’t then, but I think I can
now.
I
actually taught myself to read. My mother would read me those insipid
children’s stories and I’d ask her to trace the words with her finger as she
read so I could see where they came from on the page. They were really boring
stories for the most part and trying to figure out the marks on the paper kept
my interest better. Actually, they were more than just marks. My grandmother
had taught me my alphabet and how to spell and write my name when I was about
three and as half, so I had somewhat of an idea what words were. One day, I
just continued out loud what my mother was reading—finished the sentence ahead
of her. At once, she taught me phonics (the key to being a good reader, in my
opinion). I was off to the races at that point.
The first book I read on my own was a book
from my grandmother’s library. A collection of short stories by Guy deMaupassant. The first story I read was his “Two Friends.” He was imminently accessible,
even to a small child. He just wrote plainly and clearly. I loved that book! My grandmother came in
one day when I was reading it—actually, I’d stolen it from her library—and she
took me up to the attic where she kept all of her books and told me I could
read any of them I wanted to. She had a wonderful library. Most of the great
French and Russian writers and that’s who I began with. She also had some
Dickens but I couldn’t get into him at all.
This kind of
ruined school for me from the start. The teacher would have us reading these
really godawful books—stuff by James Fennimore Cooper in junior high, for
instance—quite possibly the lousiest major writer in U.S. letters—it’s no
wonder his work was made into early movies—it was “direct to video” writing. I
loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, but Cooper was purely boring and
his language was juvenile and just plain bad. When we had English classes, we
were required to read books that were infantile and I couldn’t stand plowing
through them. I’d bring in my own books and hide them inside the crap we were
supposed to read. I remember being caught in second grade—we were all supposed
to be silently reading some kiddie crap and I had secreted a copy of a Stendhal
book inside the book we were supposed to be reading, probably his TheCharterhouse of Parma
which I loved, and the
teacher went ballistic. She called a meeting with my mother and told her I was
defying her by reading a book not on the reading list—and that I couldn’t
possibly “understand” it. We went back home and she told my grandmother who
became incensed. She said she knew my teacher all her life and she’d always
been a moron and thought everyone else was on her level. She called her up and
read her the riot act and the upshot was I was allowed to sit by myself in a
corner and read whatever I wanted while the rest of the class read the
“approved” books. My grandmother, Louise Vincent, was one of the biggest
businesswoman in town—she owned and ran a hugely busy bar and restaurant and a
cab company, as well as owned a fortune’s worth of gas and oil and sulphur
stocks and rental properties—and if she said something, people in town
listened. I remember every year we’d go to New Orleans to Maison Blanche and they’d close the entire store while
my grandmother and mother and my sister and I spent the day as the sole
customers while models paraded the new fashions before them for Grandma and my
mother to buy. Some little twit of a grade school teacher wasn’t going to make
her grandson read The Hardy Boys Punk Ass Clubhouse or whatever.
In summers, we’d
go to Louisiana to stay on my great-grandmother’s ranch which was the world’s
largest Brahma bull-raising enterprise in the country. Those were great
summers! My grandmother’s first cousin was U.S. Senator Allen Ellender and he was often there with other
politicians and dignitaries. She was Louise’s mother and had an even bigger
library than my grandmother’s and also gave me full access to it. She had more
contemporary writers on her shelves than Grandma did—writers like Faulkner and
Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who Grandma considered “sensationalist” and “trashy.”
I couldn’t stand Fitzgerald (still can’t), but loved Faulkner when I first read
him when I was I think, nine years old. Hemingway, I recognized as he seemed to
write a lot like Stephen Crane who I also liked a lot. She also had a lot of
good European writers like Balzac.
I’ve gone far
afield of your question, haven’t I! Sorry. The thing is, I began reading very
early, decided instantly that all I ever would want to do was to be a writer,
and decided the best way to do that was to adopt the Jack London School of
Writing. To always seek out new experiences. And, that’s what I’ve done all my
life. I had one of my five wives after we’d divorced say, “You only married me
for material, didn’t you?” To which, I replied, honestly, “Yes.” She was my
first wife, a black woman I’d married in Bermuda where I was living at the time
in the sixties.
I joined the
Navy and afterwards began a life of crime, both for ostensibly the same reason.
Experiences for material for my writing. Just about everything I’ve done in
life was toward the same end—to accumulate material for my writing. And, since
I had little interest in writing about the life and times of insurance salesmen
or college professors, that pursuit usually led me to more nefarious
environments. Who in their right mind wants to live in the suburbs and mow
their lawns when they could be breaking into Joe’s Bar and Grill at one in the
morning? Or working for an escort service and vacationing in Puerta Vallarta on
some rich lady’s dime? Well, more accurately, what writer would opt for
the ‘burbs over that?
Question: So if I
understand well, you chose writing and constant seeking of new experience, but
the fact you ended up in legal trouble, would it be fair to say crime fiction
chose you? How have you ended up wanting to write about violence and the darker
side of the human condition? Was there a triggering event?
I had to laugh, Benoit.
“Legal trouble?” That sounds like I was sued for not cutting my grass often
enough by the neighborhood association... I was a felon, pure and simple. And a
convict and then, an ex-con. The “legal trouble” came from committing
burglaries, armed- and strong-armed robberies, selling drugs, etc. Cracking a
dude over the head with a crowbar. Stuff like that.
And, yes, there was a
triggering event, sort of. I had always written about the darker side of life,
mostly because that was what I’ve always seen and been exposed in my existence.
But, for a long, long time,
I hid my past from everyone. And never wrote about the truly dark stuff. At the
time, I just assumed it would hurt me, especially in publishing. I had no idea
for the longest time that editors and publishers actually like real-life
criminals as their authors! Half my agents never knew I did time or had held
people up or outran the cops in high speed car chases or been in prison. Which
meant that my stories, while dark, didn’t go into the really dark stuff I’d
experienced.
Even in my first novel, The Death of Tarpons, which is about an
abusive father and that boy’s struggle to find himself, was presented as
fiction, even though it was about 85% true and from my own boyhood. And
“cleaned up,” quite a bit from much of the horror that was my childhood. In
fact, I had a publisher who offered me a $10,000 advance back in the
mid-eighties for it, with the proviso I would allow him to put it out as
memoir. I told him I couldn’t because it was only 85% factual. He was okay with
that and still wanted it presented as memoir, and the reason I eventually did
pull it from him was that he wanted to take out some parts that would “offend some
readers.” In particular, a scene where the boy’s father beats him with a live
king snake. In his words, it “might offend the snake lovers.” This was in the
days before we even had the term “politically correct” and this asshole was way
ahead of the times, I guess. Offend the snake lovers? That’s gotta be what?
Five or six people? Like, who gives a shit about some frickin’ snake lovers?
Plus, it was a true event and it was integral to the story so I told him,
thanks, but no thanks, and pulled it. When I could have used ten dollars, much
less ten thousand. But, what price is one’s integrity?
Anyway, I held back in that
book, simply because I thought it would hurt my chances at publication if I
exposed too dark of an environment, especially if it was factual.
Keep in mind, this was the
eighties and an entirely different climate than today. Today, I know a whole
lot more about what publishers want than I did then.
What changed everything for
me was first reading Charles Bukowski and realizing for the first time that
what I really wanted to write about could be publishable.
The second event occurred
in talking to Diane Lefer whom I chose for my adviser twice for my
MFA at Vermont College. I ended up trusting her enough that I revealed my
background to her. To my shock she told me that my past was a decided plus in
publishing. Knocked my socks off when I heard that. And, that’s when I began
going to the really cool events in my life.
Diane opened my eyes to a
lot of things. Once, she asked me what I thought about a writer whom I won’t
name, but who is renowned for writing dark and even criminal stories. This
guy’s won about everything out there and kind of acts the tough guy. I told her
that my impression of him from his writing—I’d never met him in person—was that
he was a phony… and a bit of a poser and a pussy. That he tried to exude this
persona of a bad ass or even a criminal, but that his writing gave him away to
one who’d actually done time… i.e., moi. I told her he sounded like a guy who
drew mostly from the experience of maybe doing a few days in the city jail for
drunk and disorderly, but he’d never been close to the inside of a real prison.
That his idea of being bad, came mostly from hanging out maybe at titty bars
and the like. She said she was glad to hear that, because even though she
didn’t have experience herself with the criminal life, his books had always
struck that same chord in her.
But, he enjoys this
“persona” of being the “real deal,” and he isn’t even remotely close. I’ve run
into writers like him since. A lot of them, actually. Whose idea of a criminal
is the little drug dealers in their neighborhoods, most of whom are little
suburbanite punks trying to supplement their allowances from Mommy and Daddy.
Or from hanging out at stripclubs, maybe, thinking that the guys who frequent
those places are some kind of real criminal element. Usually, the kind of guy
who hangs out in those places is a loser of the nth degree and real criminals
mostly laugh at them. Not saying that some of these guys don’t do criminal
acts—some do—but really aren’t the kind of truly scary dudes you’re going to be
celling with.
And meth and crack dealers?
Gimme a break. These are just the bottom of the criminal barrel. Why would
anyone think they’re remotely interesting unless their own lives are utterly
boring? They’re the far-fringe, unsuccessful moonshine dealers of yesteryear.
Hillbilly wannabes who think that because they own a gun and have shot someone
that they’re the baddest thing on the planet. Nothing bad ass about most of
them at all. Dumb as a box of hammers is the image that springs up in my mind.
Pretty easy to figure out, as a rule. They don’t scare anybody except for those
who grew up in suburbia. I guess they seem exotic to ‘em… Must be because that seems
to be the audience for these kinds of fiction. About all that happens in a lot
of those books is a lot of gratuitous violence that seems to be there mostly
for the shock value.
Back to your question. I
write about violence and the darker side of humanity because that’s what I’m
most familiar with. I grew up with it and I chose that life when I came of age
and had a choice and could have gone the safe and secure route. It’s never
dull. And, I hate boring. Now, of course, I’m paying for it and I was pretty
sure at the time that some day I would. I didn’t work for a corporation or a
bureaucracy and so I have no pension. No savings, no money in savings, no
pension. Nada. And, that’s fine. I had a really cool life and did more in just
about any given week than some of these folks have done in their entire
existences. And lived that kind of life year after year after year. I just
never wanted to be that guy whose biggest deal in life was the two or four
years they spent in the service, or the same amount of time spent in college,
or the one time they went to Europe and backpacked for the summer. That’s it?
That’s sad. As far as I know, you only get to go around once, so why on earth
would an intelligent person spend most of their life doing boring-ass shit?
Here’s
a for-instance. There’ve been several times when I was homeless. I was homeless
in Costa Mesa, one of the richest towns on earth, and I was sleeping on the
concrete floor of a garage and eating out of the dumpster of the Bob’s Big Boy
next door for my meals. Was in pure agony from a severely pinched nerve to
where I had to be up three days in a row to be able to go to sleep for an hour.
No health insurance or money for a doctor and that was fine. Was right on PCH
and from the front door of the garage could look out at the QEII, anchored
there. Never for one second did I feel sorry for myself. Why? I was living life
and it was never boring, not for a second. I remember looking out at the QEII
and thinking about some rich dude out there, and feeling sorry for the guy. I
imagined he kind of at least suspected inside that probably the only reason the
babe on his arm was there was because of his bank account. I was living in that
garage with a gorgeous redhead who had convinced me to come out to California from
where we’d been living in New Orleans, and I was pretty sure the guy on that
boat would have loved to have a girl like that on his arm, knowing she was
there because of him and not because of the checks he could write. That kind of
shit is priceless and I’ve always been aware that it was, even in the worst of
times. It’s those times that let you know you’re alive.
I feel like I’ve lived the
Frank Sinatra version of life. I did it my way. I was getting laid every night
by a girl who screwed me because she liked the way I screwed, not because I
could give her a charge card. How do you put a price on that? The guy at the
cocktail party on the QEII was the unlucky one. I’m pretty sure your body feels
pretty much the same way in jeans as it does in an Armani suit. It’s your
weak-assed mind that tells you it feels better, mostly because some dickhead
you don’t even like pretends to your face that you’ve accomplished something by
wearing it. Your skin doesn’t know. Trust your skin.
But, I owe a debt to both
Bukowski and to Lefer. They showed me what was possible.
Question: You're a
creative writing teacher and you have written writing advice books. What's your
take on the current writing advice market and how do you think young writers
should use such a tool?
The
writing advice market is bigger than it’s ever been and in many ways, better.
In other ways, not better. Looking back to when I began writing many decades
ago, there were very few such books available. Writers learned primarily from…
reading novels and trying to figure out what worked and then adopting that for
their own work. Today, there are so many books out there that the learning
curve can be tremendously shortened. Although, like anything, there’s a
downside to the flood of advice. Like anything else, there’s a lot of good… and
there’s a lot of slag and dross.
There
are expectation problems among many writers. The expectation that there are
going to be “secrets” revealed in these books that are somehow going to
catapult them onto the bestseller lists if they only unearth and use these
secrets. I hate to be the one who tells folks that there really are no such
secrets to becoming a good writer. All of the secrets in writing are right
there in the open. They’re in the pages of novels you have open before you.
When you see something that affects you emotionally in the novel you’re
reading, stop and go back and figure out what that writer did that worked and
how he or she accomplished that.
Often,
writers read as… readers. Not as writers. They’re reading books on a very
superficial level. For entertainment. That’s fine for nonwriters, but for a
writer that’s foolish. To be blunt, it’s kind of stupid. It’s passing up the
single best way to learn to write available.
I
had a student ask me one time that if he tried to analyze every novel as a
student and not just to be entertained, wouldn’t he lose the “magic” of the
work? As it happened, this guy was a musician. Well, I said to him. Do you
understand how to play an instrument? I won’t give his responses to the
questions that follow because his answer to each was “yes.” Do you know how to
play several instruments? Do you know how to write lyrics? Do you know how a
symphony works—how all the parts go together to form a whole? Do you know how
to create and build emotion within the listener with progressions? I asked a
bunch more questions in this vein and then I asked him: “Does your knowledge
affect your enjoyment?” Sheepishly, he answered that it didn’t. It added to it,
he said, because he knew better than most the skill and craft and art the
performer brought to the work. It only heightened his enjoyment.
Another
time, I had a college basketball player ask me what was basically the same
question. Well, I said, do you understand how a man-to-man defense works? Do
you know how zone defenses work? Do you know the differences between a
one-three-one and a two-three and a three-two? Well, sure he said. Of course.
Do you know how a pick-and-roll works, I asked? Do you know that to be a good
shooter you aim for the back of the hoop and never the front? Again, he
answered in the affirmative. Then, I asked the clincher. Does that take away
from your enjoyment in watching a game? Do you think the guy sitting next to
you in the stands who knows nothing about the intricacies of the game enjoys it
more? I trust you can guess his answer.
The
same things could be asked of a chef. Because of a chef’s knowledge of spices
and foodstuffs and combinations of foods, does he enjoy eating a meal less?
It’s a question that can be asked of any art form. The answer is always going
to be that the more the participant knows about the art and craft of anything,
the higher the level of enjoyment is going to be, even though part of his focus
is always going to be on how the art was created.
This
sounds like a no-brainer and a waste of space to even point this out, but you’d
be surprised at how many would-be writers have this attitude. Personally, I
wish more of them had it. We’ve got enough competition as it is…
All
of this is to say that there are too many writers who don’t do the work
themselves while reading and expect to pick up the latest and greatest craft
book as a kind of shortcut to find this stuff out. It can’t work like that and
it doesn’t.
Does
that mean that craft books are useless? Not at all. The only thing I’d suggest
is that they’re not relied on at the exclusion of the writer doing his own work
to learn.
Also,
the writer needs to realize that craft books are these days often seen as cash
cows by some publishers. There is more pressure than ever to convince a
bestselling author to write one. They bring an enormous audience with them and
that means, sales and money, boobie. Several of these aren’t delivering much in
the way of scholarship or new material, but are mostly regurgitating things
most writers already know or have already been promulgated in earlier books.
The bestselling author often likes to write them as well, as it’s attractive in
that very often it has the effect of making them look smart and even somewhat
“academic.” I imagine if Stephanie Meyer and James Patterson come out with a
craft book, the publisher is going to be rubbing his hands together in glee at
the thought of all the large Christmas bonus checks he’s going to be able to
write out to his employees.
Those
are some of the negative things about craft books. The positives, however,
mostly far outweigh the negatives. One very substantial benefit to a writer to
read them is that very often seeing a particular bit of advice on the page
validates something his instincts have told him is something he should be doing
but he erroneously thought he shouldn’t. I had that very experience happen to
me. Like most of us, I suffered through periods where I didn’t trust my
instincts in writing. I had read book after book, sat through workshop after
workshop and lecture after lecture, where the advice had invariably been to
“just get it down, lickety-split, and then go back and ‘fix it’ through
rewrites.” Apply that “work while the ‘muse descends’ white-hot fever of
creation” and then go back and rewrite it. Well, my instincts always told me
not to do that. What I wanted to do was make sure every sentence, every
paragraph was perfect before I went on. But, who was I? I was this little
nobody and all of these published, successful writers were continually telling
me that my instincts were wrong and that I should just write as fast as I
could. So I did what they said.
And,
then, one day I picked up a new craft book and this guy (wish to hell I could
remember who it was to give him proper and deserved credit!) was saying just
the opposite. I can still remember the day I read him. He said to not do what
everybody was always advising. He said to take your time, craft each sentence
perfectly before moving on. He said that when you marked things to be
rewritten, or underlined a word you furnished in haste and knew there was a
better word but you didn’t want to stop to figure it out, or knew you were
having your character make a wrong turn, that you almost never were able to
return to your frame of mind at that point and that instead of rewriting, you
became a copy editor instead. He advised (this was in the typewriter days) to
always use your best, most expensive paper—that 20-bond stuff with the
watermark—and not the cheap stuff. He said when you came up with a word that
wasn’t quite right to stop right there and find the perfect word. That you
should never go onto the next page until the page you were writing was as good
as you could possibly make it. He said a whole bunch of other things along
these lines, and at the end, he said that you’ll still probably have to do a
rewrite but he predicted you’d do far less rewrites than you had previously.
And,
he was right. Before I read this guy, I rewrote every novel an average of 8-10
times. The instant I applied his advice, I went to an average of one rewrite
per novel.
What
had happened was that I was like most writers. I was unsure of myself and of my
instincts. I needed someone in “authority” i.e., a bona fide writer, to tell me
that what I wanted to do was okay. That my instincts were sound and to follow
them. Bless this guy! He gave me “permission” to do something I had always
known I should do, but was afraid to because it seemed to go against the
overwhelming “wisdom” of the writing fraternity.
What
I didn’t realize fully at the time that most of us who write do so because
first we were readers. Voracious readers. That means we’ve already assimilated
most of the writing techniques we’ll ever need as writers, simply by dint of
our history—of reading thousands and thousands of books. That we already know
by all that reading what’s good and what isn’t and how to achieve good writing.
That we have good “instincts” honed by years and years of reading. In fact, I
can tell very quickly the folks who join my writing class who’s going to make
it and who isn’t. The person who’s been reading nonstop and voraciously since
the age of five or six has a decent chance of becoming a good writer. The one
who admits they’ve read very little most of their life, has very little, if any
chance of success. We begin to learn to write at around that age. Not when
we’re twenty. And, I know there are stories of people who’ve had success who
fit that latter description. But, I’m talking about “good” writers, not
necessarily published writers or even bestselling writers. Good isn’t always descriptive of those authors…
Another
benefit to reading craft books is related to the above. Very often, they serve
to remind us of things we already knew and that’s valuable. Or, they show us
something that we kind of knew or suspected was true but we hadn’t yet
articulated it to ourselves and the book made it clear the thing we were
perhaps fuzzy about.
What’s
important about craft books is that even the very worst will almost have at
least one piece of solid information in it. If a person spends say fifteen
bucks on a book and learns one tiny piece of useful information, that book has
paid for itself. So, I’d suggest to buy every single one of them. The ones that
are repetitive or don’t show us much of anything new are still worth the
purchase because if nothing else, they’ll probably serve to remind us of
something important we’ve forgotten.
The
other thing is that writing changes. The public’s taste in novels changes. That
means the writing advice has to also change to keep up. John Gardner, author of one of the most popular writing books in history, realized this
(although some of the people promoting his books don’t), when just before he
died, he had lunch with his most famous pupil, Raymond Carver. At this lunch,
he told Carver to “forget everything he’d taught him in college.” That
“everything in writing had changed and that his advice then no longer applied.”
And, he was exactly right. It’s too bad that there are tons of writing teachers
in colleges world-wide that never saw this advice he gave Carver, because
they’re still recommending his books to their students. That doesn’t mean
they’re useless—they’re still very valuable, but only in context to his era.
That’s the part they don’t tell their students. Probably because they don’t
know or realize this. Much of what Gardner had to say is extremely valuable…
and much of it isn’t. If he’d lived, he would have written other books on
writing that would have refuted at least some of what he said in his earlier
books. But, he didn’t. He died and his words are frozen in amber while the
writing world has moved on in major ways.
And,
so as not to mislead—I heartily recommend Gardner’s books on writing. But, in
context. That means, read his, but read everything else in craft books,
especially the current ones. Even the bad ones, but hopefully more of the good
ones. The more you read, the more you’ll be able to sort out what works today
and what doesn’t.
By
the way, the single best piece of information on writing I’m aware of can be
found by studying Richard Brautigan’s brilliant short story, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3.”
If you read this and understand it, and more importantly, see yourself in the
story, there aren’t enough craft books in the world to help you master the
craft. You’ll see why Flannery O’Connor
said in response to the interviewer who
asked her if writing programs discouraged writers: “Not enough of them.”
Question: Last but
not least, mandatory manly question: who wins a fight to death between a Ninja
and a Viet-Cong?
Ha-ha.
I wouldn’t have a clue! I know nothing about ninjas at all, except they have
all these cartoons and chasey-fighty movies about them that some teenaged boys
enjoy, and while I was in the Navy during the start of Viet Nam, I wasn’t
stationed there, so know nothing about the Cong either. I suspect the Viet Cong
dude would prevail, however. I’ve known several people who wear those cute
little black suits designed by airy “artistic” types down at the dojo and who
learn martial arts and never have worried about them too much—too often they
seem to have taken up these activities because they either have a Napololeonic
complex or have a history of getting shoved around and think that learning this
stuff will make them bad, somehow. My knowledge of the Viet Cong is that they
were serious dudes who would cut you down in a New York second without even
thinking about it much. Plus, the few movies I’ve seen with ninja-like
characters usually look like some choreographer who was a bit light in the
loafers programmed their shit and when twenty of them attack a guy, they seem
to favor doing so one by one, which always struck me as a curious way to fight
and not a way I ever saw or was involved in down at the Dungeon in New Orleans.
I think if they came up against a Viet Cong, he’d just kind of shake his head
and mow them all down with his machine pistol. I do think that breaking boards
and bricks and things is kind of cute, though.
To
be honest, I don’t have much of an opinion of martial arts. I’ve known several
guys who were into that stuff—both on the bricks and in the joint—and nobody
takes them very seriously. I’m sure there are some who have an attitude and can
back it up—I’ve just never met them, to my knowledge.
I
remember a guy in high school whose dad was a state cop and who had him take
all of these classes. Guy ended up a black belt in something or other. The guy
was a first-class bully. He pulled some of his Karate Kid pink flamingo moves
on me in school one day and I hit him up alongside the head with a rock the
size of a baseball when we met up after school. I guess my black belt in rocks
trumped his in Tai Kwon Whatever… I think a lot of those guys log in a lot of
mirror time, looking at themselves practicing their “moves” and imagining
themselves down at the beach kicking the ass of the guy who kicked sand in
their faces in front of their little girlfriends.
I
have a story about this guy. One night during my senior year of high school, I
was living in the little town of Lakeville, about fifteen miles south of South
Bend. One night I was up in South Bend partying and left for home about three
ayem. When I hit the outskirts of town, I punched it and all the way home the
speedometer stayed at 120 mph. There weren’t any other cars on the road so I had
clear sailing. I’d just hit Lakeville and was making the turn on the far side,
when a cop’s light went on behind me. I pulled over and up walks this state
trooper.
He
took me back to his car and started writing the ticket and talking to me. He
said, “I’ve been chasing you ever since South Bend and I had you at 120 all the
way.” I said, “Well, that’s kind of good news. Tells me my speedometer’s right
‘cause that’s what I had.” He handed me the ticket and I looked at the name and
recognized it right away. It was the Karate Kid’s father. I told him I knew his
son and we were great friends. We got to talking and he ended up tearing up the
ticket and writing me a warning. True story. That wouldn’t happen today, of
course. But, in those days and in that town everybody drove like that. And, we
didn’t have the point system yet nor DUIs or any of that stuff. In fact, in
Lakeville the Justice of the Peace was also the town barber and he’d let you
pay your tickets off in installments. There wasn’t a single week out of the
year when I wasn’t paying off several tickets at once.
A
good friend of mine, “Hairs” Miller and I had a contest that year to see who
could get the most tickets. Alas, I lost. I covered three walls of my bedroom
with tickets and Hairs covered his entire bedroom, plus half of the ceiling. He
had a ’55 Chevy and nobody could catch him.
I
saw the trooper down at our teen hangout a few weeks after he’d given me the
warning, and it turned out his son had told him that maybe we weren’t such
great friends after all and that I’d been the guy who’d thumped him. He came up
to me and told me if he ever caught me again, it wouldn’t be good for me.
Luckily, he never did.
The
guy was kind of a joke to begin with. He’d sent a good friend of mine to the
joint a year or so before for life—the guy’d killed his mother and this guy was
the cop who caught him—and my friend swore in court that if he ever got out
he’d look him up and kill him. He wasn’t the first who’d told this guy
something like that. There were a lot of guys in Pendleton and Michigan City
who’d made the same threat and some of them were out. Anyway, this trooper
ended up wiring his house and driveway and yard so that if anyone pulled up or
moved in the yard, all the lights would come on in the house and outside and
start flashing. He’d throw something on and come running out with his shotgun.
All the kids in school knew it, and when we were out drinking at night, there
were dozens of times we’d just whip into his driveway, watch the lights come
flashing on, and then beat it out of there. Funny stuff!
There
was a dude in Pendleton who, when he came into population the
first day and out in the yard for recreation, started yapping about what a bad
ass he was—had some kind of black or purple or rainbow-colored or whatever the
big color is in those belts and he’d be walking along and whip out one of those
“Cute Lil’ Tweety Bird Crouching Tiger” thingys, and all I saw was guys
grinning and I gave him about a week before somebody turned him out. It was a
lot sooner than that… And, I’m pretty sure they didn’t surround him with twenty
guys and go at him one-on-one… On the other hand, if a Viet Cong had showed up
in the yard and people knew it, I don’t see the same reaction happening… That’s
a guy who’d get some respect.
The
thing is, when a guy has to attend a school to learn how to fight, he’s
probably not going to be a dude you have to give much thought to. It’s kind of
like those guys who lift weights down at the gym. Gym muscles are cute, but I’d
worry more about the fat slob or the anorexic dude who looks like a stiff
breeze might knock him over and who doesn’t say much, but who you know has a
nine under his arm and will use it. I suspect a lot of these guys spend a lot
of time starring in the movies running through their heads… You can just tell…
Anybody you'd like to thank, regarding
the release of THE RAPIST?
Absolutely!
Cort McMeel and Francois Camoin for believing in me and this book; Jon Bassoff
for the same and for putting his own reputation and own money behind it, which
is always the truest test if someone believes in a book; a whole shitload of
writers I respect for reading, blurbing and reviewing the book and giving it
their blessings and high marks, and to Charles Bukowski and writers like him
for showing me the way. And, of course I’d like to thank my readers. Without
readers, writing is like having sex with yourself. The feedback you get for
your performance is ultimately flawed.
Thank
you for a wonderful forum and opportunity, Benoit. Thank you for pushing me to
be honest and posing great questions.
That’s it, folks. Check out
Benoir Lelievre at his Dead End Follies for great
interviews, book reviews, and all kinds of things on writing.
Hope you enjoyed this.
Blue skies,
Les
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