[Kennedy is an American author, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt of an interview originally published in the February 1987 issue of Delta and based on conversations and correspondence between Kennedy and Dubus during an eighteen-month period of time in the mid-1980s, Dubus discusses his characters, his works, and the writing process.]

[Kennedy:] Contemporary American fiction seems to me to harbor two basic kinds of writer and critic: those who hold that fiction is about people and events, and those who hold that it is about language and perception and imagination. Writer-philosopher William H. Gass has said, "That novels should be made out of words and merely words, is shocking really. It is as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber." You, on the other hand, seem to care very much, even tenderly for your characters. Frederick Busch has said that your characters "are bent beneath a weight that Andre Dubus, one feels, would bear for them if he could—their utterly plausible and undefended humanness…." Do you think of your characters, in a literal sense, as people?

[Dubus:] Yes, I think of my characters in the literal sense as people. They make me cry when they do things I wish they hadn't done. I remember having Peter Jackman, in "Going Under," in the shower for three days. I was worried about him. I wrote "Adultery" because Edith started getting my attention and saying, "Man you left me in a slutty mess [at the end of "We Don't Live Here Anymore"]; how about coming back and seeing how I'm doing?" Yeah, I think of the characters as people.

Do your characters dictate their own actions (as E. M. Forster said his did on the famous Passage to India), or are they galley slaves, as Nabokov claimed his were when asked this very question in The Paris Review some years ago?

They dictate their own actions and, boy, sometimes I am really happy with what they do and, other times, as with Polly shooting Ray ["The Pretty Girl"], I am disappointed. If Nabokov's characters are galley slaves, I might understand why; while having flu in Iowa years ago, I was reading Lolita, getting a hard-on, then I got well, and never remembered to pick it up again. I do not think any good writer has characters who are galley slaves. I don't like Camus's fiction, although I admire the man deeply, and his essays, but to me, his characters are always acting out his philosophy. I can't read Sartre's fiction or plays for the same reason. I prefer the essays. I think most of the act of writing is intuitive. I think the act of good writing is intuitive, but it comes from a very conscious intellect. That might be a trick answer. I always find fiction taking turns that I have not forseen, and do not understand, but I feel to be inevitable and right. When that doesn't happen, the story dies….

Sometimes I get the feeling your characters are victims of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett: In the thrall of cocktails and bluesy bar rooms and the guy or gal that got away.

Yes. A lot of the characters—that's a very good reading—are victims of the songs of the 40s and 50s. I think that music had a deleterious effect on a lot of us because it made many of us believe that marriage was not a beginning of a very difficult vocation, the most difficult one that we would undertake, but that it was in fact the happy ending, and that we would all dance happily through life and that those of us who lost a woman would indeed have drinks in the bluesy bar room and sing, "Set em up, Joe, I've got a little story you ought to know."…

Are the emotional problems of your characters caused by being in a confusing stage of social evolution where traditional marriage is breaking up faster than traditional bonding needs can evolve to the new social situation?

I think you're asking me to tell you that marriage is over, jealousy over, that all those feelings I have had since childhood have changed in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. I do not believe any of this. I see sexual love between two people who marry more as a deep and abiding friendship, a tolerant and forgiving friendship which also involves sharing each other's bodies. I believe the commitment to write and the commitment to love are so much alike. A friend of mine wrote to me after he read the manuscript of "Finding a Girl in America," and he said, "Hank has finally learned that loving is as hard and takes as much discipline and working commitment as writing does."…

In my opinion, you write startlingly well from the point of view of a woman. I'm thinking of Edith in "Adultery," of Beth in "Separate Flights," and of Miranda in "Miranda Over the Valley," to name three. To what do you attribute this ability? Is the jump from one heart to another of equal distance whether from man to man or man to woman?

Nadine Gordimer, in her introduction to her selected stories, deals with this entire problem by saying that all writers are androgynous, and I believe it. I am stunned—and I am not putting you down, my friend—at how often I am asked in interviews how I can write about women, when I meet women all the time who write well about men, and I think the real answer to your question is, as you say, the jump from one heart to another is of equal distance whether from man to man or man to woman. I think that is the answer. There is something universal in all of us. Some female characteristics I would not be able to write about without asking a woman, but I've spent a lot of time asking women, and I have always been interested in women. I have always enjoyed talking to women, I love women. If you are interested in a certain type of person, and you love the type of person, it is not that difficult to become them and write about them. I think I would have a lot easier time writing about a woman than I would, for instance, about a fictional Ronald Reagan….

Do you think of yourself as an American, at home in the American culture, in the daily life surrounding you, or are you alienated from it, or from aspects of it? Do you have faith in the political and social patterns of America?

Yes, I am American at home in the American culture and in the daily life surrounding me. I am alienated from aspects of it, especially in the direction that American politics is going—that is, nationalizing and sanctifying greed, but calling it something else. I do not have faith in the political and social patterns of America. I see the country getting more and more greedy and I deeply believe that if the country is going to continue to be based on greed and selfishness, that it doesn't really deserve to survive, but of course the victims of this greed and selfishness deserve to survive so what do you do about that? You can't have a revolution. The government has all the guns, and besides, my scant knowledge of history tells me every time there is a revolution, the mother-fuckers who take over do the same thing. I am absolutely in favor of socialized medicine or some sort of national medical care. I don't think anyone should be afraid to get sick. I don't think the poor should have rotten teeth in their mouths. I don't think our friend's baby should have died in Maine because she couldn't afford medical care. I am in favor of people who work at a place jointly owning that place. I guess that's socialism. I like two views—Tolstoy's, if you have a culture based on Christian values where each person is trained to help the other, then you will still have murderers and rapists, but you will not create any. We certainly create them. And I like what Einstein said in an essay that our education is all wrong, we should not be taught to compete; we should be taught to work for the common good.

You write a lot of stories about murder and violence—"The Pretty Girl," "Killings," "The Shooting," "Townies," and in The Times Are Never So Bad, you use a Flannery O'Connor epigraph about how violence strips the personality to what is eternal. Is this violence a reflection of American consciousness, of your own, of both, or more of an attempt to reach that eternal vision of the human personality?

I think it is mostly a reflection of American consciousness. I think if I lived in Canada or Denmark, I probably wouldn't write much violence. One of my son's girlfriends was mugged. My twenty-one-year-old daughter risked her life because a person was pointing a gun at the window of a teacher my daughter was going to visit. Someone else very close to me was raped. And I can't read the paper, even the local one, without coming across violence. I see this country as becoming a very violent country and I react to it. I do not think my own consciousness is violent. The eternal vision of the human personality: Well, Peggy read me that quote from Flannery O'Connor, and I stole it because it was wonderful for an epigraph and is probably true in some cases. I think my attitude about violence is expressed in "Killings." As in "Man's Fate," the assassin comes back from stabbing this guy, and they are all talking about the wonderful new world they will have under communism, and he says, "What about me?" And you realize the act of killing has removed him from nature and the same thing with Matt Fowler in "Killings." Once he kills a human being, he has violated nature and is forever removed from it….

For five and a half years, you were a captain in the Marine Corps—a warrior artist. How did that feel?

If you mean by warrior some berserk blood-stained guy enjoying killing people, I never had that feeling. If you mean a professional soldier, that is what I felt like. I didn't want a war. As a young man, I wanted to live an active life and keep that apart from my artistic life. But I resigned from the corps because my father died. Only later did I realize it was my father's death that gave me the freedom to resign. My respect for him and my need for respect from him were not greatly diminished by distance and by age. I do not think I would have had the courage while he was alive to explain to him that I was leaving a good and secure and honorable, in those days, profession, and was going to take a family of one wife and four children to Iowa City for an assistantship of $2,400 a year….

Which of your contemporaries and which of the younger generation of writers do you read and find exceptionally good?

This is dangerous. I am bound to leave somebody out. There are so many. John Yount and Paula Fox, I think, are America's greatest living novelists. I think Gina Berriault is our greatest living short-story writer. I think Nadine Gerdimer is internationally a great short-story writer and an equal of Gina Berriault. I like Tobias Wolff, I like Raymond Carver. I like the galleys of the first book of stories I just read by a woman named Sharon Sheehe Stark (The Dealers Yard, 19851 The Wrestling Season, 1986). I like Susan Dodd (Old Wives' Tales, 1984; No Earthly Notion, 1986). I do reread Chekhov. I like a book of stories by Nancy Huddleston Packer called Small Moments, published by the University of Illinois Press which published my old friend Mark Costello's The Murphy Stories. Contemporaries. Contemporaries. I like Thomas Williams, Mark Smith, I like Kate Chopin, though she is not a contemporary. I like Philip Caputo. Not only for nonfiction (Rumor of War) but his two novels. I once tried to convince Dick Yates to read Caputo's novels, and he said, "Well, I don't read novels by journalists." Well, I don't either, I have a prejudice, but I told him Caputo's not a journalist. I found an old quarterly that no longer exists, I was going through it one night to see who was in there with me and what became of them, and there was Philip Caputo. He had some poems there, and the biographical thing said he was going off to Spain to write a book of poems and stories called A Rumor of War. My hunch is he made the right move in making it autobiographical. I like very much his second two novels. I am also a fan of Joseph Wambaugh. A lot of people raise their eyebrows at that, but I think he's the only man who can tell us what it is really like to be a policeman in a large city, and in his first novel—he has the Watts riot from the point of view of the police, and it is wonderful. He does contrive, he is clumsy, but to many novels I read contrive and I think it is one of the built-in flaws of the novel. But he is honest and good. R. G. Vliet, a book called Solitudes, is one of the best American novels I have ever read. Nobody knows anything about it. Matter of fact, nobody knows anything about Paula Fox or Gina Berriault either.

Are you a voracious reader?

I guess. I don't read as much as I want. I find that during the baseball season I tend to either watch or listen to the Red Sox. That's 162 games. I don't think I miss more than ten a year. I also find that sometimes when I am writing intensely, I don't have the kind of energy it takes to do good reading at night, and I will then turn to detective fiction which I do not think is a minor form. It just takes less literary intensity to read.

Which of your own fictions do you feel most satisfied with? Do you regret any?

I guess I'm most satisfied with "Adultery." I don't know if it's the best, but it took four hundred typed pages, seven drafts, seventeen months of work spread over maybe two or three years. And I tried to put into there everything I knew about God, death, and women, and marriage. You ought to by now open a beer and say, "So why didn't you use the cover of a matchbook, asshole? Postage stamp?" But I am most satisfied with it, I guess, because it threw me off the saddle so many times and hurt me, and I kept giving up.

"Going Under" did the same thing to me. I kept quitting it. I feel very good about "The Pretty Girl" which wasn't even as hard to write, but it was very draining. I feel good about a story called "Waiting," which came from a hundred-page novella which was no good, and the total time on that seven-page story was fourteen months. And I feel a certain satisfaction for a story called "Delivering" because on a Sunday afternoon, I was taking my daughter Nicole to her riding lessons, and I decided to do something I rarely do and that is make up a story. And I decided to write about a little boy and no more sensitive little boys like my autobiographical things, but a tough little boy—decided on the situation and the story was done, the first draft was done in five days, and it was just about complete. Since Voices from the Moon is fairly recent, I feel good about that, but I even feel maybe better about something I was working on last January [1985] in Montpelier, a short novella of fifty-three pages called "Rose," which I think took more chances than a lot of other things I've done. I do not think I regret any of them. Some of them I don't like anymore, but that's because I was younger when I wrote them and could have done them better, so I don't put them in collections. I don't even regret The Lieutenant having been published. If I wrote that now, it would be a good hundred-page novella, but as it is, it is a weak two-hundred page novel, but there are real people in it so I don't regret it. If I regret, I don't send it off. By the time I send it off, I know I have taken it as far as I can, and there is really nothing more I can do with it. My only regret would be if I had been lazy or copped out….

How often do you write? And how much do you get done on a good day?

I write seven days a week when I am writing something. Not always. Things happen. Flu, colds. But that's my intention. Sometimes I intentionally take time off. Right now I'm working on a novella that I haven't worked on in over a week because I went to the University of Arkansas, but I was going to take a break from it anyway because I was starting to hate it, and the vacation has done me good. I'm ready to get back to it. A good day to me doesn't depend on the number of words, but on how well they got written. Many days if I get a hundred words I'll say that's fine. Other days I suddenly get two thousand. I probably average three to five hundred.

Each morning I start by reading the last page I've written which has been interrupted in half sentence, half scene, and I look at the words in the margin. They tell me where the scene is going, at least where it was going the day before; then I read from the beginning making small changes, but mostly I read from the beginning to get into the story. It is damn near impossible for me to just pick up where I left off because so much has happened from the time that I left off until the time that I have picked up again: dealing with the builder, the house, the phone, the child, hunting, having fun, drinking, who knows? When I write a novella, I only read the section that I am working on or else it would take two hours to finally get back to work. Then, when I finish that first draft in long hand, I tape it, and I listen back, and I think the taping is very valuable because as you can see, by then I have read much of the story or novella, some passages, hundreds of times. Reading them aloud makes me concentrate more, and then listening back points out very quickly to me repetitions, lines of dialogue that I don't need, rhythms that I should work on, and then with luck, I type the final draft….

I've heard various descriptions of the process of writing. Some say it is like feeling your way through a dark room, others like viewing a landscape in lightning. Hemingway, I believe, said that sometimes it is like drilling for oil, other times like mining coal. Strunk and White say it is "a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by." What is it for you? Meditation, inspiration, mining, drilling, trial and error?

First, I would like to add a quote by Updike that I like very much. He said it was like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights are showing you, but if you keep driving you'll get there. For me, it is less inspiration or meditation than trying to see what you are trying to write, working very hard, trying to find the words and the rhythm to go with it….

What is the objective of fiction? What is fiction's highest aim and greatest accomplishment?

I think the first objective of fiction is to give pleasure. That can be the kind of pleasure that makes the reader continue to turn the page, to want to find out what is going to happen. There are other forms of pleasure. There is the pleasure of insight, there is the pleasure of good company. I think that is the first objective. And without achieving that you can't get the rest. I think the next objective is through the pleasure to draw the reader out of himself or herself and take that reader into a search where both of you go in without knowing the answer. Look for some questions, watch some people dramatize the questions, live with those people and see if you and the reader can come up with an insight into the truth. That insight might be that there is no answer [chuckles], that insight might be terrible. So it is pleasurable, musical, enjoyable on a high level, and also sometimes on a level more prone to titillation, and in the process of this dance, we confront the difficulties of life and we try to understand, we confront mortality, we try to live other lives, to leap into the heart of another and understand.