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"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
By Dennis Drabelle
[10/08/99]

Ivory Tower
"The Iliad" and other tales of war
My momentous monologue turns to dust under the scrutiny of a well-prepared student.
By David Alford
[10/08/99]

Biography as screenplay
Edmund Morris has conceived the life of Ronald Reagan as a movie. And it's a bomb.
By Charles Kaiser
[10/07/99]

Reviews
"Walkin' the Dog" by Walter Mosley
The stories in this new collection flirt dangerously with agitprop but wind up delivering a cumulative shock.
By Jesse Berrett
[10/07/99]

The genius of Danzig
Günter Grass' Nobel Prize honors the stalwart leftist who rebuilt the German novel on the literary ruins of the Third Reich.
By Gavin McNett
[10/07/99]

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Well, yes. I guess it was either Camus or Sartre who said that because of technology, we no longer make history. History happens to us -- the new weaponry, the new communications and all that. I don't much want to play anymore. I enjoyed the game as a young man, but I don't enjoy it now. Early on, I would think of writing plays, for instance. But Broadway has so changed, there's no longer an opportunity.

You once said you were going to give up writing novels entirely and devote yourself strictly to plays.

I did write a couple. What's good about plays is you get extended families, and you can smoke backstage. [Laughs.]

No co-workers as a novelist, I guess.

No, it's a very lonely business. I knew Jack Kerouac at the very end, I knew Truman Capote at the very end, and they were all alone.

Kerouac especially.

Yeah.

I didn't realize you'd crossed paths with him.

It was accidentally. He'd moved to Cape Cod for a short time, and I was living there. So somebody brought him around.

Did he know your work?

That I don't know. I'm quite sure Capote didn't. We were neighbors out at Sagaponack, on Long Island. He'd lost all his friends, the ladies at restaurants where he ate, because he'd started writing about them. So he would come over to my house every afternoon -- I have a swimming pool -- and say he was there to treat his bursitis. But he also knew where the vodka and the orange juice were, and that was part of the treatment. I have no indication that he had read anything by me, and Kerouac probably hadn't, either.

Kerouac seemed very bitter and demoralized at the end of his life.

He was furious because he had been screwed out of a fortune, which was "Route 66." It was a huge television hit, and it was an obvious rip-off of "On the Road."

Getting into the short stories, a few of them deal with the war. Robert Scholes called Dresden "the completion of your education in pacifism." Would you have become a writer without your World War II experience?

I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they'd leave, and they shouldn't have left. These women were absolutely first-rate reporters.

No room for fresh blood. And so on to General Electric, and on to your career as a novelist. You've been a lot of things along the way -- Saab dealer, volunteer fireman. How did those experiences inform you as a writer?

Well, they were real, you know? I'm glad I was a foot soldier, I'm glad I was a PFC in combat. And I was glad to really be a teacher. So there's a lot of stuff I don't have to imagine. I don't have to imagine being a car dealer -- I was one.

That sounds like a particularly funny experience.

I think it's the business story of that decade. I was the third Saab dealer in the United States -- you could have a dealership just by asking for one. Had to put up my own money for five cars. Terrible car then, may I say. My story as a Saab dealer is the business story of the decade because in two years I lost only $35,000. [Laughs.]

A lot of these early stories deal with themes that would be carried through your novels -- technology, materialism and notions of "progress." They made me wonder if you think we're sort of re-living the 1950s in our rush toward technology or in our blind belief in progress.

At the time I wrote the stories, we weren't swamped by technology. Now we are. Jesus, it's all around us. There wasn't even television then. What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

What do you think that's doing to people?

Well, they are very commonly more satisfactory friends and relatives than what most people really have. And so, sure, it's analgesic, it's comforting. So many people have awful friends and relatives. [Laughs.]

What about a return -- or maybe it's never left us -- to the sort of consumerism we associate with the '50s?

I've called the '50s the Golden Age of White People. They were the ones doing the consuming. People of color and women were making very few purchases on their own.

Children are featured prominently in these stories, it struck me -- I've never seen so many children in your past literature. They're always there exposing the adults, exposing lies and hypocrisy. Does this have anything to do with the fact that you were raising a family at the time?

I had a lot of kids -- three of my own, and I adopted three nephews.

Your sister's children.

Yeah. But I think that one of the things parents have to do is to teach children hypocrisy, because that's how you survive -- by being nice to people who are contemptible. So the kid coming into the world sees hypocrisy and wants to point it out. You're nice to this awful person? What you're doing is a crime, isn't it, Dad?

"A Present for Big Saint Nick" is like that.

Yeah. I mean, come on, wise up, we have to eat. And so the kids learn hypocrisy as one of the early lessons.

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