The Possible Death of Literature: An Interview with William Giraldi

by Jessica Pitchford

William Giraldi is senior fiction editor of AGNI and teaches in the Writing Program at Boston University. His stories and essays have appeared recently in The Antioch Review, The Believer, The American Scholar, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Georgia Review, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, and Poets & Writers. He is a regular book critic for The Common Review.

Q: A couple of years ago, you did a piece for our website for a feature we used to run called “The Bedside Table.” In it, you talk about the piles of books—literal hills—surrounding your bed. And while you claim to be a “modest book-reader,” you are clearly invested in the practice of reading. You’ve published countless reviews and written about the work of authors as varied as Lee K. Abbott and William Gay. As a writer, in what ways do you see the books you read influencing your own work? And what authors are topping the mountains these days?

A: When we were in Utah this past summer speaking at a writers’ conference, Julianna Baggott and I, during a rare quite hour, got to talking about the “kinds of writers” we are, and she came to the astute conclusion that I am a reader who writes, whereas Julianna classified herself as a writer who reads. I’d much rather be what Julianna is because I’d get more writing done. Also, I’d write more creative work. So much of my work lately is scholarly and critical because I can’t help writing about what I’m reading or have read. I can’t help but see the world, process my life through literature and philosophy and theology. So to answer the first part of your question: it’s impossible for a book not to influence my writing, since I’m so often writing about books. Now, as for my creative work, Lee K. Abbott and William Gay have been monumental influences on my prose and storytelling sensibility. My fiction started off, way back in my late teens when I began writing, as very Carverian domestic dramas. But lately I’ve been off the wall with mythos and language-drunk stories about the stories we tell. What authors am I delving into these days? It’s always the same for me; my reach is limited and I’m trying to change that—the Milton and Homer and Hopkins and Wordsworth and Freud. One needs a lifetime really to understand this work. So I’ve made it my life.

Q: In 2007, you published a candid piece of nonfiction in The Massachusetts Review, “Unstrung: Some Notes on Depression and Literature.” You open up about your struggles with depression, an early and particularly dark period lifted thanks to an unlikely friendship, reading, and a burgeoning writing career. Therapy, you write, has always been less effective than literature. Can you talk a bit about that transformative nature of reading?

A: Yes, I wrote that therapy has always been (for me) less effective than literature because all of my therapists have been laughably inadequate. I read somewhere that Harold Bloom couldn’t stand going to therapy because he found himself constantly correcting his therapist on the proper methods of interpreting Freud. That wasn’t my problem precisely—I’m not matching myself with Bloom—but I felt something very similar: why am I here in therapy when I could be home reading Freud himself, or Jung, or Winnicott, or Joseph Campbell? So that’s what I did. Literature is a manual for how to navigate the inevitable anguish of this world. That sounds highfalutin, I know, but I mean it. Literature helps salve the wound, the wound every one of us has, the original sin Augustine stuck us with. Of course the Augustinian notion of original sin is a metaphor for how imperfect and damaged our species is, how much work we need to do in order to live honest and productive lives. Emotional truths are waiting for you in literature, and I honestly don’t know how people travel through this world without Wordsworth. I would have hanged myself years ago if I couldn’t have sought refuge in him and others. Reading is transformative—I love that word—because it forces a reckoning, a confrontation with truth in a way that few other art forms can do. Run the other way if you find yourself on a date and the person says that he doesn’t have time to read, because what he really means is that he doesn’t have time to think or feel.

Q: This November at the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, you’ll be presenting on memoir and writing about grief. What’s your take on how to handle this difficult subject in nonfiction?

A: I designed that class at Sanibel because all of my students were writing about grief anyway, so I figured, why not just have the class center on that theme? Why else do we write if not to shed some layers of emotional or spiritual tar? The problem with writing about grief is that it all too readily lends itself to the fatal flaw of sentimentality, so the mission for anyone writing nonfiction about his mourning is to be conscious of when his prose lapses into preciousness. Approach your grief with the eye of a biologist—that sounds ridiculous, I know, but it requires waiting until the sharp initial sting of loss has begun to hurt a little less. Nietzsche wished grief upon all of his acquaintances—“friends” is too strong; Nietzsche didn’t have friends—because he believed that anguish made better people, that anguish led to fulfillment if one knew how to cultivate one’s pain. During his own precious moments Nietzsche liked to garden, and he devised many of his theories on human nature while tending to plants. I don’t necessarily wish anguish upon my acquaintances, but I do, with Nietzsche, believe that if one has been beset by loss then one has an obligation to cultivate the grief into something beautiful, something lasting. Call that art if you wish, or understanding, or wisdom, or whatever. Pain itself is useless. Pain is pain and nothing else. Randall Jarrell, if I’m remembering correctly, has some very nice lines about this, about how people suffer pain and wish to call it by another name in order to make it useful. One’s only victory over the inevitability of anguish is to live in modest periods of contentment. 

Q: Speaking of conferences, you’re slated to participate in a panel about sports in fiction for AWP 2010. You used to be a bodybuilder, which you’ve written about before. In “Unstrung,” you write about outgrowing weightlifting, how—though you no longer feel it has to be so—you came to realize that “literary writers don’t lift weights.” How do you see sports, particularly that fascinating world of weightlifting, figuring in with your own writing these days?

A: These days sports doesn’t factor in my writing at all, actually. Editor Jeanne Leiby at the Southern Review is doing a baseball issue soon and asked me if I was into baseball enough to write about it, and I said no way, I can’t, I know nothing about sports. I live in the most fanatical baseball town on Earth, and so people assume that I must be a Red Sox worshipper simply because Boston is my city. But no: after I wrote the bodybuilding essay for Kenyon Review, I was done writing about that topic, and about sports in general. Bodybuilding was an extremely informative section of my life, and it taught me lessons I still implement today—dedication, steadfastness, etc.—but the real value of that part of my life was that it made what I hope is a successful essay. When I showed that piece to my pal Steve Almond he was convinced that it was the best thing I had done to that date because he thought I captured that maniacal underground world with accuracy and shamelessness. I hope he’s right. He usually is.

Q: You’re a writer who’s had success crossing genres between fiction and nonfiction. I read a story of yours, “Autumn’s Girl,” in the Summer 2008 issue of The Antioch Review, and I was struck by how the narrator’s emotional storyline mirrors your own history, which you’ve detailed in essays. How much does truth inform your fiction, and do you ever have trouble deciding which mode best suits your material?

A: Yes, “Autumn’s Girl.” I’ll tell you a funny fact about that story: I wrote it when I was twenty-one years old, which was, let’s see, about twelve years ago, and it took me twelve years to publish it because editors would say no, and I’d rewrite it, and they’d say no again, and I’d rewrite it again, and so on. That version that appeared in Antioch Review had gone through twelve years of revisions before Bob Fogarty at Antioch called me and said yes, you got it right. The story is essentially about the depression of a young man in Boston, which sounds so dreadful, I know, and dreadfully autobiographical, but the trick was to make it about the manifestations of his depression without falling into the pit of bathos, which I hope I accomplished. To answer your question straightforwardly: truth informs my fiction as much as untruth does. It depends. My last story for Antioch Review was called “Lament for Car,” and it’s not about me at all, but my cousin, who nearly lost his Toyota Supra worth about $300,000. For an entire afternoon we thought the car had been stolen by the mechanic who was working on the engine, until we discovered that this mechanic had moved shops without telling all of his clients. But it was a tense few hours, and my little cousin, bless him, was a melee of emotion because he had invested so many years and so many dollars into this car. But the story I wrote ends differently, with the car stolen and the fellow’s life in ruin, which is the beauty of fiction, is it not? You can alter history. This is how we play God. I never have trouble deciding if material is better suited for fiction or nonfiction because the material decides for me. I don’t know how it does that.

Q: When it comes to your writing, it seems no approach is off limits. I’m thinking, in particular, of your stories “Lament for Car” and “Wonder Woman Was My Lover.” The former is written from the first-person point of view of a college-aged woman reflecting on the summer her father left the family in search of his prize possession, his Toyota Supra, absconded by their shifty mechanic. The latter is told from the vantage of a gay, bunny-suit wearing construction worker who has a brief love affair with Wonder Woman. I’m wondering how you decide upon your narrators, and if you see your work fitting within any particular style or literary tradition.

A: I struggle with this often, so it’s fitting that you ask. I wanted once to be Hemingway: his work is very clearly one thing, fits into one box, is easily classified and easily remembered. That sounded very nice to me for some reason. Carver too. I wanted to be Carver. And as I said, I began with imitations of Hemingway and Carver, but then something happened a few years ago: those voices, those plots, those people I was writing about just weren’t enough for me. And this is something that Steve Almond, for one, is grateful for, because he always hated my Carverian or Hemingwayesque fiction: he believed that it never captured the full range of my personality, my real voice. He wanted me to write down all those stories I had been telling him, in person, for years. And for some reason I followed his advice and began, which resulted in a novel called Busy Monsters that I recently finished. But again, I’m not sure I decide upon my narrators as you suggest, although on some level, yes, of course I do. That story you mention, “Wonder Woman Was My Lover”—how do I explain that kind of chimerical wackiness? A homosexual construction worker in a bunny costume who gets seduced by Wonder Woman in a conservative Pennsylvania town? I have no idea where that stuff comes from. But you’re right: my narrators are all over the place, and I don’t like that because it makes my work very difficult to classify, and for some reason I want to be classifiable. It bugs me that I don’t fit neatly into any one style or tradition, and people have a hard time with my captions since I write different kinds of prose: some label me story writer or fiction writer, others book reviewer or essayist or memoirist. It’s all very confusing.

Q: In addition to publishing prolifically, you’re a senior fiction editor of AGNI and a professor in Boston University’s Writing Program. How do you balance your writing, editing, and teaching life?

A: I’m not balancing it all very well at the moment, I’ll tell you. My wife just had our first baby and so now I have another hat to wear, the most glorious hat of them all, but still, another hat. All year I work with piles of prose I must edit to the letter, to every comma, and then correspond with the writers about those edits, with William Pierce, our senior editor, and with Sven Birkerts, our editor. For several weeks twice a year my life is overrun by AGNI, but I’m always, all year long, reading the submissions that come in, trying to nudge Bill and Sven to love the stories and essays that I love, and traveling around the nation to speak about the journal at various conferences and events. It’s a labor of love, as you know; it must be for any editor, because the devil knows we don’t do it for the money. My teaching life at BU is more complicated because I’ve chosen a full schedule three days a week, because I love it, every minute of it, and I need it, I need to be at the front of the room, in contact with students, in such intimate contact with the literature that has made me. My wife thinks I give my students too much of my energy, and she’s right, I do, but I can’t help it. They mean very much to me; I’m genuinely fond of students, and perhaps that’s where my popularity with students has come from: some people work with computers, others with cars, but I get to work with these impressive young adults of every stripe. I majored in drama as an undergrad because I could think of nothing more exciting than to make Aeschylus, Beckett, and Pinter come alive onstage, but I gave up the theater to pursue literature full time, so the classroom is my theater now, and I’m grateful for that. In fact, being a teacher means more to me than being a writer. If I were given a choice between writing and teaching I would choose teaching without hesitation, and not simply because Boston University allows me to support myself, my wife, and my baby boy, but because teaching is my contact with the world. Without it, I’d be a hermetic misanthrope holed up in my home library. I don’t like writing very much, to be honest. It’s very difficult to do right and to do well, and I’m a profoundly indolent fellow. I’d much rather tickle my baby or watch The Office or read the diaries of Samuel Pepys, which are, aside from the Sherlock Holmes stories, the most fun a reader can have with a book. No, writing is not something I chose. Somehow it decided to choose me, and a handful of people in the world seem to think that I do an okay job at it, so I keep doing it even though I don’t like it. I wish I were good at some other art or sport or something, but I’m not. Like most writers, I’d much rather be a musician, but I didn’t choose my parents wisely enough, and so music was out from the start. I’m very sad about that, actually. I’d like to be a professional motorcycle racer, or something sexy like that. A soldier or a fighter pilot, predictably enough. To circle back: I’m not balancing all my tasks very well at present because my son is brand new and he’s taken over my thinking and feeling facilities. I’ve been working at a long critical essay on George Singleton for the Georgia Review for many months now, and I’ve begun an essay about my baby son, but I go days or weeks now without writing because I’m in the middle of my semester and when I come home I want to hold my baby and do nothing else.

Q: Since you’ve got a piece forthcoming in TriQuarterly—and given your own editorial background—I’m interested in your reaction to recent news that in the spring, after forty-five years in print, TriQuarterly will cease to exist as a print journal. What do you think this indicates about the fate of literary magazine publishing in general?

A: My reaction was tearful disgust. Susan Hahn, the editor and one of the sweetest humans alive, was a mess of shock and grief, and my heart broke for her. The indication is greater than we think; the death of these important journals signals not only the death of literary magazines in particular, but the possible death of literature in general. Now, let me just say that I don’t think literature can ever die, not completely, but the powers-that-be can certainly marginalize it to the point where book publishing perishes, where new talent dissolves, where our communities are considerably stupider. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that reading literature doesn’t necessarily make better or smarter people. It most certainly does. People simply don’t care enough about the printed word because they think that watching the Internet glow is an equivalent experience. It isn’t. Even many writers, for God’s sake, don’t care enough about reading anymore. Let me give you an example. When Julianna Baggott and I were at that conference in Utah last summer, I sat on a panel discussing the memoir. One of my fellow panelists was apparently a well-known memoirist with several books in print. She spoke mostly well and had some accurate notions to float about memoirs, but after I spoke to the new writers in the audience about the importance of reading the best autobiographies in history—by Casanova, by Franklin, by Cellini, by Rousseau, by Ulysses Grant, by Robert Graves—this writer admitted that she didn’t read those books because they were too factual and not introspective enough. Too factual? Rousseau not introspective? Was this malarkey of some sort, I wondered. Then, in response to a comment I had made about The Iliad, she admitted that she had never read Homer. Understand: for a writer to admit that she doesn’t read the best books ever written is rather like your cardiologist admitting that she never bothered to learn where the aorta is located. I was stunned by this. Here’s an apparently popular memoirist who has no interest in reading the best books in her own genre. And we expect the whole of civilization to care about literature? Most of our writers don’t even care. In conversation with this writer later on I learned that she didn’t have the dimmest idea about literary journals, never mind a passion to sustain their lives. So it’s no surprise to me that literary journals with the esteem of TriQuarterly are perishing almost by the month. What gives me a smidgen of hope is that new journals with money and appeal are popping up in their stead: journals such as A Public Space, The Normal School, Slice, and Opium, run by the tireless saint Todd Zuniga.

Q: For several years now, AGNI has been recognized for its online presence. In the May/June issue of Poets and Writers, Sven Birkerts talks about AGNI Online as an extension of the print magazine, saying that it has really taken on a life of its own. What do you think of the merits of publishing web-exclusive content, and do you imagine this as a direction that more and more print magazines will be headed in the future?

A: The only piece of fiction that I’ve allowed to be published exclusively online is the story we spoke about, “Wonder Woman Was My Lover,” because it was Nerve, and they have a strong online presence. And actually, the only nonfiction I’ve published exclusively online was for your website a few years ago, and only because I cannot say no to Julianna. I’m an old-fashioned fellow who owns a bow tie, for the love of God, so I’ll always feel that a print magazine has more merit than an online journal, even if that online journal is Narrative, or Slate, or Salon. I think that more print journals should initiate a stronger online presence only if that online presence is able to augment the success or viability of their printed pages. Southeast Review has one of the most intricate and substantive websites I’ve ever seen, and the website preps me to look forward to the next issue of the printed journal. AGNI’s website, as well: I think of it as a kind of teaser, an appetizer to the printed pages, even though my fellow editors, Bill and Sven, consider our website a thing unto itself. If you look at what Todd Zuniga is doing at Opium you’ll see that he’s taking the printed journal and the online material and fusing them into a real literary presence all over the world. Check it out: you’ll see what I mean.

Q: Julianna Baggott has said she’ll go on record as claiming you “the best contemporary writer who does not yet have a book—if that was an Oscar category, he’d win.” So, tell us ... what’s your unpublished novel about, and when will we get to read it?

A: Julianna is very kind for saying that about me, but I’m probably far from the best contemporary writer without a book. I don’t have a published book because I’m beginning to think that I simply don’t have Julianna’s talent for making books. I’m an essayist and story writer; each essay and story is rather different from the last, so whatever book I slap together has a hard time staying together. Yes, I’ve had several agents over the years who have tried to sell early novels I wrote when I was twenty, or story collections, or even collections of memoirs, but I haven’t had any success because my talent, if I’m permitted to call it that, is for 8,000 words, not 80,000. The new novel I recently finished revising for the 15th time is called Busy Monsters, and the new fellow who represents my literary interests now has it in hand, but will anyone buy it? I don’t know; I doubt it. Steve is ecstatic about it, and maybe a few others, but it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever done, based loosely on Don Quixote and The Odyssey, all about myth-making, the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive, and the monsters who dominate our psyches, each chapter another story about the beasts we all wish we knew better: Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the giant squid, aliens, ghosts, sexual deviants ... ourselves. Now, tell me, who in NY is going to publish that? If I cared more about publishing a book I’d probably write something more publishable, more marketable, and I wish I could bring myself to care more, but I’m so indolent, as I said, and so eager to nap and read. The magazines and journals have been so generous to me, I can’t complain. My first piece for The New York Times Book Review just ran in September of ‘09; The Believer and the Southern Review have been very kind to me over the years. So I don’t want to complain about not having a book, and I don’t have the energy to complain anyway. But—I do have the perfect title for a book if anyone ever asks me to collect my critical essays: The World Doesn’t Need Another Book.

Q: Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.

A: Terrence Holt, author of the story collection In the Valley of the Kings.

Q: What kind of child were you?

A: I paid neighborhood girls a quarter to see their panties.

Q: What’s your relationship with rejection like?

A: Like my baby boy when he’s hungry, and then, a day later, like my baby boy when he grabs hold of my wife’s teet.

Q: Do you have a writerly habit you’d like to break?
 
A: Writing.