What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (12 page)

LT:
Max, for instance, in
The Western Coast
, is in the Party, but he steps back from its ideology and observes it. He’s an incredibly interesting character because of that.

PF:
I think that you have to be attached and detached at the same time—who knows to what extent we can be detached?—but enough so that you can see what it is that you’re up to. I had an image once: a lynch mob, a victim, and a mediator. And I was all three. I didn’t exclude myself from any group. In some way, that sense of being absolutely susceptible to all of it, to human flaws, to virtues, to circumstances, to experiences—has helped me a lot. Because I tend—as we all do—to close in on myself; I have to keep it, especially when I write.

LT:
You never let any of your characters off the hook. You don’t write stories of redemption, which, from my point of view, is an American disease.

PF:
No, I know, it’s “Have a good day!” I wrote recently to the Royal Folio Society in England. I owed them 75 words about Proust. I said that I’d gone one day to Père-Lachaise cemetery and had seen the tomb of Gurdjieff, a spiritual healer. It was covered with flowers and candles, some lit the morning or afternoon I was there. I found Proust’s—black marble. And on it a little metal juice can that had contained frozen orange juice, and in it one small bramble rose. I wrote, Gurdjieff said we could reach a higher consciousness and be in control of our lives. Proust taught nothing, but he wrote the most extraordinary book of the 20th century,
In Search of Lost Time
. And he didn’t believe in ordinariness. But the childish ideas, that smiley face! It’s like naming the atom bomb the “peace bomb.” It’s a kind of perversity.

LT:
In
Desperate Characters
, when Sophie and Otto go for a drive, she sees a poster of an Alabamian presidential candidate. You wrote: “His country, warned the poster—vote for him—pathology calling tenderly to pathology.”

PF:
That was based on George Wallace. (
laughter
)

LT:
Your fourth novel,
The Widow’s Children
, like
Desperate Characters
, takes place in a weekend. It’s a very disturbed family romance. Laura, the mother, Clara, her daughter, her brothers, all have terrible relationships. The family is supposed to be celebrating. Laura keeps it a secret that her mother has just died. It’s an intriguing withholding on her part, and strategy on your part as author.

PF:
A lot of things went into that. I don’t think in advance about psychology, because then I’d be a psychologist. I think there is an impulse in Laura to keep it private. She was possessive about her mother’s death and her mother, in a very primitive way. There are lots of reasons. She wanted to punish her daughter and her brothers. But that was also very primitive—to punish them for everything, for being themselves, for not paying attention to their mother, for neglecting her, for their laughter, for their lives. And then there was a child’s secrecy. That is very significant for me: a child’s secrecy and horror, because Laura was frightened by the death of her mother. If she didn’t say it, then it didn’t happen.

LT:
Like magical—

PF:
Magical thinking, exactly. Her main reason can fit under the subtitle “mischief,” of a certain psychological bullying, viciousness, revenge. There are other reasons, but they’re less significant.

LT: The Widow’s Children
is structured in sections: Corridor, Drinks, Restaurant, specific places or times in which we expect things to happen or not to happen.

PF:
The corridors of our lives are very different. We pass through them on our way to different places, but they also exist in themselves as places where things happen. In the restaurant, Laura looks around; Clara, all of them, are at the table, and they’re moored in middle-class-life comfort. It’s the hour of drink, persuasion, assuagement and satisfaction, but not at Laura’s table.

LT:
The discomfort . . .

PF:
It’s very extreme, and Carlos, Laura’s brother, can’t wait to get away, to escape. They all want to escape, except for Laura’s longtime friend Peter, who begins to sense, who sees how bad his choices were, but how inevitable.

LT:
In the last paragraph of the novel, after Laura’s mother’s funeral, Peter remembers his childhood.

PF:
I remember the last line. He had “known the cat and dog had been let out because he saw their paw marks braiding the snow, and felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.” That’s a kind of hope. We all wish we were good.

LT:
Your characters all want to be good.

PF:
Yes, I think that’s true. Except for Laura.

LT:
Each of your books is quite different from the others, though there are recurrent themes, like justice, injustice, people trying to see their own flaws, wanting to be good, honest.
The Widow’s Children
stands out as something unto itself.

PF:
It’s so dense and compact a book. But I think in the last novel I wrote,
The God of Nightmares
[set in New Orleans], I kind of eased up on pounding away at my themes. That’s really my most hopeful novel.

LT:
Do you know why?

PF:
No, except that it has a kind of easing.

LT:
I think it’s that, in the text itself, there’s forgiveness.

PF:
I think that’s true. Oh, yes.

LT:
There’s the protagonist Helen’s mother’s letter to her. Her mother’s dying, and she asks Helen to forgive her. She also forgives Helen.

PF:
She says you have to forgive me for myself. Because we’re all helpless, the way we are, until we can strike a judgment, a point—that’s why judgment comes in . . . . I was just having a very complex thought. I don’t know how to speak about it.

LT:
At the end, Helen discovers that Len, her husband, was in love with her best friend, Nina, years ago. She feels terribly betrayed.

PF:
But after their fight, she passes her hands over his body while he’s asleep. Yes, it is forgiveness.

LT:
Was your complex thought about forgiveness?

PF:
We can’t forgive easily. We have to take into account what was done. Various people get treated so badly. People get mistreated
all the time. Black people were treated as an entity in a terrible way. We’re such primitive creatures that we go by what we see, which is a different skin tone. Part of us is primitive.

LT:
Helen leaves New Orleans, marries Len and the novel jumps into the future, when she thinks, “We were no more than motes of dust, drifting so briefly through a narrow ray of light that we could have no history.” All of your characters experience that.

PF:
Yes, it’s a kind of profound life melancholy. But it’s offset by feelings of affection for other people and, in this case, particularly for people in the French Quarter, who took Helen in, so to speak. She had such a good time when they told their stories.

LT:
The secondary characters are wild, vivid figures. It’s a war novel, like
The Western Coast
, but even more so. People go to war, come back, and don’t, which is felt in the entire city.

PF:
Everything was made very precious by that sense of leave-taking. I just suddenly remembered the black man looking at the ship, and Helen and Nina saying, “What do you think he was thinking about?” Nina says, “Getting away.” I did see a black man looking at a ship, while living on the Mississippi. But I don’t know if he was longing to get away.

LT:
Your fifth novel,
A Servant’s Tale
, begins with two words, “Ruina! Ruina!” It covers a lot of time and history. Luisa Sanchez is a character of great abjection. As a child, she comes to New York,
America—El Norte—from San Pedro, where her mother was a maid, her father, the son of a plantation owner. When she grows up, Luisa decides to be a maid.

PF:
You know what one of the reviewers said about that? A black woman in the
New York Times
wrote, “Why didn’t she pull herself together, go to college, and get a degree?” It’s like a corporate person rearranging a book of taxes, when they say it should go here in this column rather than here.

LT:
Women writers are meant to write women characters who uplift the sex, like black writers—women and men—are urged to uplift the race. By your having Luisa make that decision, it flies in the face of—

PF:
The American Dream.

LT:
Horatio Alger, middle-class values. The novel confronts claims and feelings—ideologies—that Americans hold dear. Luisa wants to be a servant.

PF:
Americans hold family values dear, even as they’re killing their own children. I think that people in terrible situations lie to themselves about the situations they’re in. I feel that lying is the great human activity; being right is the great human passion. Because if you’re not right, you’re nothing.

LT:
Luisa marries Tom, a public-relations manager; they met at a political meeting in Columbia University. You feel part of his
interest in her is her ethnicity, her so-called authenticity, and his wanting to overcome his middle-class ways. Then he tries to change her. But Luisa will not be changed by anyone or anything.

PF Yes. This is what has happened to her: she wants her childhood back. She doesn’t give it up until the end of the book, when she’s able to think about something else. She wonders about Maura, one of the boarders in her parents’ apartment. Luisa is the victim of herself. She’s given everything over to reconstituting, discovering, her own terrible, lovely childhood and her grandmother. That’s what she wants. She goes back to San Pedro and discovers that it’s all changed, but the old witch is there. Gradually, in that last section, she recognizes it, without being able to name it, but the only way a reader knows that she’s recognized it is that she can think of something else, in a way that’s absolutely free of everything.

LT:
Thinking about a person other than herself gives her the possibility of another future.

PF:
I knew that she wasn’t going to act the same way afterward. Even though so many years had passed, and she hadn’t seen Ellen Dove, her black friend, I thought Luisa would contact her again and see about getting a law degree or something. (laughter) Then there was the last story in
The Coldest Winter
, “Frank.”

LT:
One of the boys you were teaching.

PF:
Yes. Narcissism is not a good thing to have in the sense that you fill in everything with yourself, and people suffer so. You don’t just have to be an indulged, rich child to be narcissistic. In fact, it’s the opposite. The poor children. The world’s filled up with questions of the self and the sense of the self. It’s a dreadful, agonizing torture. And that’s what happens to people, it seems to me, who have deprived, difficult, complex lives—when it’s very extreme, out of some kind of alarm, everything in one’s self—whatever it is—rushes to fill in all the spaces. So I used not the usual, sentimental relativism, that is, something larger than the self, but something other than the self.

LT:
That’s a very important distinction. You wanted Frank to go to an observatory and look through the big telescope, to see the stars.

PF:
I had taken a course with Professor Motz, Lord Motz, professor of astronomy at Columbia. This was in the 1950s. I had a year with him and I couldn’t go ahead, because I hadn’t been to high school. I had only been there for three months. I didn’t have the trigonometry I would have needed. I also couldn’t go on with geology, which I loved.

LT:
You had only three months of high school?

PF:
Yes, pretty much. But I went to Columbia for four years, and managed other courses outside of the science courses. I’ll tell you, my father was a terribly irresponsible man. He had a lot of charm, but he was an alcoholic.

LT:
In your memoir
Borrowed Finery
, when you were going to meet the daughter that you had given up for adoption, you wrote, “In the face of great change, one has no conscious.” You were hoping the plane would crash.

PF:
That’s right.

LT:
When your characters have to face change, they’ll do or think anything. Again, you’re fearless; your characters don’t couch their thoughts. Most writers would avoid their characters thinking what yours do.

PF:
My husband, Martin, thinks it’s because I didn’t go to college. (
laughter
)

LT:
Your characters have prejudices. Again, white novelists mostly shy away from writing about race, which is obviously a major subject.

PF:
Yes, it is. It seems so important to me. My friend Mason Roberson, who was a writer and part of the Harlem Renaissance, lived in Carmel for a while. We used to have very funny phone calls. He wrote continuity for Sam Spade, and one day he called me up when I was living in San Francisco. He said, “I have a question to ask you.” I said, “Shoot.” He said, “What’s ‘shortnin’ bread’?” (
laughter
)

LT:
You also write about your mother in
Borrowed Finery
. You go to see her after 30-odd years, when she’s dying. She offers you a family photograph, but then she hides it under her bed covers.

PF:
She was such a savage that she didn’t try to conceal anything about herself, though she concealed the picture very effectively. There was something remarkable about her that way; she would never pretend to be anything. I spent very little time with her, but once when she was in New York, with my father when they first came back from Europe, she was in a little brownstone on the East Side. I remember looking down a flight of stairs, and there was a brown, straw baby carriage with a hood. She looked down at it and said, “You know, the woman whose carriage that is killed her baby last week. Isn’t it interesting to look down and see that carriage?” She was a terror for me. Any creature can give birth and walk away, and I thought that’s what she’d done.