An Interview
with Charlie Baxter
Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Baxter is the author of 4 novels, 4 collections of short stories, 3 collections of poems, a collection of essays on fiction and is the editor of other works.
by David Murphy & Katherine Settle
19 October 2007
Katherine Settle (KS): I had taken my son on a camping trip, and all of a sudden everything went to crap. My cell phone didn’t work anymore, and so we really didn’t know how to communicate. We were rediscovering difficulties about communication Still, I love people being ingenious and finding ways to communicate.
David Murphy (DM): Yeah, communication. There was a guy in my home town who collected those crystal radios and he had the biggest collection I had seen then and have seen since. He had an entire room specifically in his house for the radios and I think he had eight shelves, and each shelf was about a foot and a half to two feet high, and all the way lining his room, the way some people have books lining their walls. It was crazy.
Charlie Baxter (CB): I wanted to create some like that when I was a kid: a radio, all of which I had built myself, so I tried, but I didn’t want to use a crystal. I wanted to use a razor blade and a safety pin. The tuner I could make, and I could get a razor blade and a safety pin, but I couldn’t make my own earplugs. Nobody can make their own earplugs. Or, at least I couldn’t. That I had to buy. And you can’t make wire. It’s like rope. You gotta get the wire. Even Thoreau had to borrow a shovel.
KS: Just makes you think how specialized those basic things are. My dad was a chemical engineer, so I think sometimes I channel some of those interests in those things.
CB: Yeah. My son is a civil engineer—actually a structural engineer. I don’t know where he gets it from, because, actually, in spite of this talk about crystal radios, I can’t fix anything.
KS: Maybe it’s not the same. Maybe it’s not the same skill. You know, I wouldn’t think so. Because, the guy at the repair shop has completely a different skill set than a structural engineer.
CB: I thought I was going to grow up to be handy, but my stepfather never taught me any of that. He couldn’t be bothered. And you have to learn it early if you’re going to be able to do it.
KS: Yeah, Dad dumped some clocks in our laps that were broken, so we could take them apart, and we did, and it was a lot of fun, but we didn’t fix them. But just seeing how things worked together was pretty fascinating—it was a secret life, and it made me fascinated with automata. In the 17th century they were making these life sized automata that would write and draw and paint, and that was just amazing.
CB: It was the great age of automatons. Clock works.
KS: I looked on YouTube where they had one—
DM: I don’t know what an automaton is.
CB: An automaton is like a robot. You know, a pre-robot. Which, you know, means a wind-up man, or a wind-up doll, or a wind-up anything.
KS: And they could even be life-size. And what was fascinating about—I mean, if you Google it, I mean, if you check it out on YouTube, there’s one of a little boy, and he draws a picture and he has human eyelashes, so he can close his eyes, and if you crumple up a piece of paper and put it on where he’s drawing, he blows it away. This little puff of air comes out of his mouth and poof! He blows it away. You’ll have to check it out sometime.
DM: All right.
KS: It’s very cool. I love clockwork.
CB: So, should we talk about literature or writing for awhile?
KS: If you want to….
CB: Then we can go back to robotics or whatever (everyone laughs).
KS: I loved the…I read the interview you gave to Powells.com
CB: Uh-huh.
KS: And you had said something about a mosaic style of writing—I wasn’t sure if should save that for our class period or say it right now? I’m kind of in the same boat, which makes me very interested in that, I thought I was a language kind of writer, and I’m finding I’m more of a character driven person, and they’re kind of developing and going outward and in to each other. Is that sort of the same thing you’re talking about?
CB: It certainly could be. Start a story by saying to yourself, ‘I’m going to get this person on the page.’ You don’t want to do put this character in a long scene. You do it as a snapshot. And that’s an interesting way to write a story; something about that method suits readers, because our attention span tends to expand when we read such pieces. I always found that sort of writing congenial. The thing is, you can’t do write that way forever. You have to introduce something into the story, usually, to make it go somewhere. Some kind of risk, a danger. Because finally, readers are going to say, ‘This person is very interesting, but what’s the story?’ And they won’t mind it if you give it to them in little pieces, as long as the pieces add up to something, a spiral of events or a life.
KS: Right, because it’s such a visual culture now, that we need those immediate code-feedbacks to engage with characters.
CB: Exactly. We’re going to virtual and auditory mediums. Obviously this is the effect of screens, of screen culture, of TV and movies. Screens are everywhere in our lives.
KS: One of your works, A Feast of Love, is in post-production as a movie, now, right?
CB: No, it’s out. It’s out. And it’s already disappearing from theaters. (Everyone laughs.) Yeah, have you seen this? This is the movie that I— (Charlie picks up his novel, A Feast of Love which has a mosaic of images from the movie on the book’s cover, and Charlie shows it to us.)
KS: It looks beautiful. There’s Morgan Freeman.
DM: How do you feel about the adaptation?
CB: It’s okay.
KS: This is a big topic in our class. Why do the short stories seem to disappear without a trace, yet there’s so much more commercial interest for novels and film?
CB: Well, people would rather read novels than short stories. They’d rather have a relationship than a one night stand. But, my stories have had a pretty good run. They’re still mostly in print. They’ve been anthologized. You know, I have nothing to complain about.
KS: Kind of one of those sad things, the way of the world. Once you release the work, people do what they want.
DM: It’s not the author’s work any more.
KS: Sometimes those interpretations can be really weird.
CB: Well, when the story is published, you’re powerless as to how people read it: what they say about it, how they’re going to criticize it.
KS: So, does workshop for us function like that a little bit? You know, like it’s a testing field to see what kind of reactions you’re going to get, to see if you’re totally wide of the mark?
CB: Not in my workshops.
KS: How do your workshops work?
CB: In my workshops you can’t, for the first fifteen minutes, say whether you liked it, whether you didn’t like it, where you “had problems.” What you have to do is talk about what the story seems to be doing, what the story is about, the form the story takes, and whether the subject is adhering to such-and-such a form. Whether the form and the content are working together, or whether they’re working at cross purposes. And that takes some time to get out. It is not in my class…. I mean, we’re talking about technical issues of the story. You have to open the toolbox and talk about the technical issues of the story. I don’t care whether you like the story or not. I don’t care whether I like the story or not. I’m asking about what kind of story it is, and what kinds of problems it has. To get it described formally and thematically, that’s what a workshop is trying to do.
KS: I like that.
CB: You can talk about where you had problems in the story after you’ve been discussing it for twenty minutes or half an hour, but you have to have gotten—you have to be attuned to the writer and have some sense of what he or she seems to be doing with the story--the techniques that have been produced--and if you can’t do that, you’re not a writer.
KS: From my perspective, in terms of having my work workshopped, that would be wonderful. That would be a great way to start, I think. Because it would also require the people who are reading your work stay really engaged with it.
CB: You’re right. They have to have read it closely. To have reread it closely. To have thought about it and to have internalized it. ‘What’s happening here? What about this dialogue? What about this scene? What about this characterization? What about this plot?’
KS: It seems to me that that calls out the best in your reader and—
CB: That’s right.
KS: And it’s a challenge—
CB: That’s right. Absolutely.
KS: The best writers that I’ve talked to—like you—have a generosity of spirit and a dedication to honesty. They have both of those, because it’s hard to be honest without hurting people.
CB: It’s not going to hurt someone as much—it saves them a lot of time by saying, ‘I think this story wants to be X, but over here I don’t think it’s doing that. But if it wants to be X, the main thing that you—the writer—should thinking about is setting this piece over here in order to make that other piece work.’
DM: I have a different—a more divergent sort of question.
CB: Yes.
DM: I read The Art of Subtext, and I could filter out what seemed to be a mild obsession with the writer Bernardo Atxaga’s—is that how you pronounce his name?
CB: Ahtshahgah.
DM: Atxaga’s work , Obabakoak. I was wondering if you could discuss how obsessions influence your work?
CB: Ahhh…. Let’s talk about obsessions. (Everyone laughs.) And why obsessions are really good for fiction. They’re not good for life. It’s not good to have an obsession in life. It can wreck your life. But an obsession in a fictional character usually means that that person really wants something and is thinking about it all the time and is going to do something, usually, in order to get it. Readers like this, because it means that something is going to happen. You know, the character is going to be a villain or he or she is going to be a hero, but it means that something is definitely going to happen in a consequential way.
So, it’s not that I want to be obsessive, although at times in my life I have been, it’s that I recognize that for characters an obsession is really good in making causes turn into effects.
DM: So it seems to me that obsession as a character trait is a function of what makes plot move.
CB: I would say that plot is a function of character. You start with a character, a character who desperately wants something. You know, money. Or a woman. Or a man. You know, it can be greed or love or lust or needs to get somewhere, let’s say to Singapore, for whatever reason. ‘I’ve got to be in Singapore. I’ve got to be in Singapore.’ So I can see the story going somewhere. If you think about obsession with a man or a woman. I once started a story called ‘Stained Glass’ with the line “She thought he was a decent enough man until she tried to break up with him.” Given a line like that, anyone could write the story.
DM: I read in your interview with Dave Weich that you said you thought a large part of your work was about people who are watching other people who are happy.
KS: Wow.
DM: I wonder if you could comb over that again or tell us if that perspective has changed?
CB: No. (Everyone laughs.)
KS: ‘No, I won’t comb over it again.’
CB: I’ve been thinking about that problem a lot. I used to teach undergraduates. They would say, ‘These stories are depressing. These stories are morbid. Why can’t we ever read any happy stories?’ So I would say, ‘Okay. Great—where are they? Name one novel—one serious novel—with a happy ending. They couldn’t do it; they would just look at me. So, I would say to them, ‘Fiction is a dramatic medium, and as opposed to, say, the lyrical poetry, a dramatic medium usually requires trouble: trouble, unhappiness, danger, all of the grungy things in life. Now, comedy can usually help resolve those matters. But most serious fiction can’t extend its narratives with lengthy scenes of happiness over hundreds of pages, with the result that—I see a couple over there, and they’re obviously lovers and they’re crazy in love with each other. They’re probably not the story. My looking-at-them is more likely to be the story, in the way that Adam and Eve are not a story so much as Satan’s gazing at them is the story. Happiness is not something you experience, happiness is something you remember, according to Oscar Levant. When you’re in the middle of happiness you’re not aware of it; if you were, you wouldn’t be happy. And that’s why you can’t write an entire novel about happiness. Nobody has ever done that. They’ve come close. But they’ve never quite done it. Ah, and so: Yes, I still believe that the truth is that, if we’re writers, we are usually setting up dramatic situations in which somebody has been set outside the circle of happiness and is looking at it and thinking, ‘What do I have to do to get over there?’
KS: Makes me think of John Cheever.
CB: Ha! I’ve just written an essay about this subject, and this whole problem is called ‘Regarding Happiness,’ and the last half of the essay is about one of Cheever’s stories. You bet. Cheever is all over this problem. And there’s a story of his called, “The Worm in the Apple”. It’s completely about this. But, you know, all of Cheever’s fiction deals with the emotion of exclusion.
KS: Do you work with that as well?
CB: Yes, look in my book, Saul and Patsy. Exclusion is central to that story, to that novel. And in a way to this one (Charlie indicates The Feast of Love).
KS: Do you know whether or not the reading is going to have copies of the books you wrote? I really wanted to go by Hastings and pick up a copy of some of them.
CB: I don’t know what they’ve ordered and what they haven’t ordered. So, does that answer your question?
DM: Very nicely. I think that was an excellent response. This is kind of a two part question. And, I’d like to ask them both before you respond. Does the extent to which society makes fiction writers and poets justify their craft disturb you? And, what is your response to poet/critic/chairman of the NEA like Dana Gioia who says that,
‘The voluntary audience of serious contemporary poetry consists mainly of poets, would-be poets, and a few critics. Additionally, there is a slightly larger involuntary and ephemeral audience consisting of students who read contemporary poetry as assigned course work. In sociological terms, it is surely significant that most members of the poetry subculture are literally paid to read poetry: most established poets and critics now work for large educational institutions. Over the last half-century, literary bohemia had been replaced by an academic bureaucracy.’
CB: Well. Nobody questioned my right to be what I am once my fiction started to make money. America is a pragmatic culture. Americans tend to judge ideas and activities on whether they ‘work’ or make money. That’s the intellectual industry of our country. There are places in this country, New York, San Francisco, and a few others, where nobody will ask you why you’re engaged in the making of art. So if you say, ‘I’m making art,’ nobody will bother you. Of course, you still have to put food on the table. When people ask you to justify yourself--‘You’re a writer, why do you do that?--’ you can duck the question. In America, any writer who isn’t making millions will seem peculiar to the mass of people. In Europe, they’ll say, “You’re a writer? Fine. Where can I read something of yours?” It’s not quite so true here because we’re so pragmatic. Once my work started to be published, people stopped asking me questions like that.
As to the second question—that’s a huge problem that I don’t know that I’m equipped to answer. One of the nominees for the National Book Award this year is Robert Hass. Hass has a huge readership. People love his work: non-poets, people who like to read poetry. Allen Ginsberg had a large readership—people still read Allen Ginsberg. People read Louise Glück and care about her work. Books for poetry sell better now than they ever have. There are more books in poetry, and some of them don’t sell very well. But I don’t like it when people start to trash an entire artistic activity because it’s not selling ‘properly.’ Are there adequate justifications?
I think it’s just not true that only poets read somebody like Bob Haas or Eddie Hirsch or Louise Glück. Lots and lots and lots of people read these poets. Gioia has been taken up by the Republicans in a big way because he says things that these business people like to hear—that poetry is unimportant, and that we don’t need to pay attention to it—but I don’t like the position he’s getting himself into when he makes statements like that. He should know better.
DM: There’s really no way to stamp art out, even if you wanted to. Myself, I’ve been writing for years, and I’ve never made a cent off it.
CB: Yeah.
DM: At this point, I should know that I’m either a terrible writer or that people don’t want to pay me for it, or something like that. There’s no profit for me to write. But I write anyway. It’s essential to me.
CB: This period of a writer’s development—the one you’re in right now—is the hardest one in a writer’s life. It’s the one where you just don’t know. You can’t know. You can’t know what the future is. I didn’t know; nobody knows at your age. It’s a crapshoot.
DM: A person can write for years and not get published.
CB: That’s right. But that doesn’t mean a person’s failed. That means that there’s this thing you wanted to do, and you did it. You may have had to do other things along the way, but there was this thing that you wanted to do. There were points in my life when people would say—my sister-in-law once said, ‘Why do you write about people with such depressing lives?’ Another person said to me, ‘I hate your fiction. Why do I hate your fiction?’ Somebody else said, ‘How long are you going to go on doing this?’ Don’t worry too much about these moments. They happen.
KS: How do you feel about the way that your book has been changed for the movie version?
CB: I have nothing to complain about. I sold the book. I know what happens when books are adapted to movies. You know, I’m not a child, and I’m not complaining.
DM: What you said there, though—there are advantages to not being published. An unpublished work, for instance, will never be finished or considered as permanent as something that has been published, so unpublished work is always a living, breathing thing that can be revised whenever the author wants. When a work goes out, and it’s published, it becomes concrete.
KS: That’s a great point, because I saw at the Beach Museum of Art—there’s a beautiful collection and a visiting artist came who had a work in the collection, and it was in storage. She wanted to rework it, so she just sat down and looked at it, and she reworked it, and nobody dared say anything. (Everybody laughs.)
CB: I can’t remember who it was, it was Monet or somebody, who was banned from the gallery because he would come in and start working on his paintings that were up on the wall.
KS: Do you ever do that? Have an ‘A’ text and a ‘B’ text that have been published in different forms?
DM: It’s seems so hard to rework a novel after it’s published.
CB: Once it’s published, it’s out there.
. . .
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