[In the following interview, Garrett explains his approach to writing.]

George Garrett is a friend and helper to many of his fellow writers, a kind man who has been generous with his time and his energies, a warm, wild, funny man, a great storyteller, a vital person. A list of all his publications would take fifteen pages. In addition to books edited, articles, book reviews, poems and stories in periodicals, he has published four books of poems, five books of stories and four novels: The Finished Man; Which Ones Are the Enemy; Do, Lord, Remember Me; Death of the Fox. He also wrote Sir Blob and the Princess: A Play for Children, and the original story and the screenplay for the film, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He has taught at Rice, Wesleyan, University of Virginia, Hollins College, University of South Carolina, Florida International University, and Princeton. He helped found Transatlantic Review and was for some years its poetry editor.

[Wier]: We were talking earlier about readers. How a reader, over a period of time, comes to anticipate what different writers are going to be doing in their books. When you write how much do you try to anticipate your reader? Do you have in mind an ideal reader, ideal reactions, etc.?

[Garrett]: You can only think of one, which was a startling discovery to me. It's a very obvious, basic thing. In most of the literary forms you're only addressing one person, because only one person can read the book at a time. This is one of the really great distinctions between a book and any other form of narrative. The book has all the strengths of direct, intimate conversation with one person. And, so, yes, I think of a reader, but I suppose different readers at different times. I'd like to please myself as reader, but more than that I have in mind an ideal reader who's a little more sensitive, a little smarter than I am. In this sense this imaginary reader has a share in the creation of the story. Part of my job is to engage and charm and delight that imaginary human being to the extent that the human being will participate in the dialogue and that makes the book, the poem, the story, possible. Which doesn't mean, of course, you're trying to please everybody, or any numbers of readers. There cannot be a numbers game finally, because after you get published it becomes purely a numbers game and is meaningless. Ego gets involved when someone says "I've got thirty thousand readers." But it is important for young writers to get published so they have the occasion to meet that one imaginary reader. After that it's only arithmetic and the difference between one and thirty thousand is very very small.

What would you like to accomplish as a writer? What do you see for yourself at some time, when you look back at your work? Do you ever think about that?

I don't think about it directly, but it is a very good question and one that's very pertinent to some other things I'd like to talk about. Unconsciously it has an effect on me. I deal with young writers a lot, and I know that what they want is clearly different from what I want at this point. Now I'm not talking about accomplishment, recognition, that sort of thing—all that is like love and sex, there's never enough. And you remain subject to gusts of hungers of one kind or another. You hope you're mature enough to recognize, ah, I'm being victimized by a gust of hunger or desire—but you hunger for different things, even in terms of the relationship to the work.

We talk about prize fighters at a certain point ageing out of the game, and this is not because their reflexes are really slower at age thirty, which a lot of trainers will tell you is not really true, and, besides, it's a hard thing to prove. In a certain kind of technical way, prize fighters should reach their peak in the first five years of their thirties, but, by thirty most of them are finished. So the thing used to be to say "They're not hungry any more, laziness has set in, they've gotten complacent." But I don't really think that's true. I think they're just not hungering for the same things, and, therefore, they aren't really fit competition for the younger fighter. And there's a connection here—the older writer has other aims and hungers, new ones he didn't know existed before. His hungers are not the same as the younger writer's.

All of us probably would profit from going back and taking a basic writing course and doing sonnets and villanelles again, however traumatic it might be, like learning to skip rope and punch a bag again, but—and this is an exciting thing about writing—such skills as I have acquired are only applicable to the books that I have already written. I don't know if they are applicable at all to the books I would like to write in the future. That's kind of disappointing to realize. I understand Eliot's poems, "Ash Wednesday", and "Four Quartets", in those terms much better than I did ten or fifteen years ago. The psychology of it, when he keeps coming back to what do you do with what you did, is a running theme in there as far as the literary part of it is concerned.

Since this is so, since the movement is in some way forward into undiscovered country, and since you don't know if any of your skills have fitted you for this, it's a challenge and a total, empty, scary kind of thing. I somewhat envy writers who haven't happened on a certain skill, or are able, apparently without being unhappy, to continue to do the same thing and perhaps do it better as time goes on. I'm not sure whether I could, now, do some of the things I did before. I don't know, even if it were a matter of life and death, if I could once again muster those particular skills, the combination of skills and desire, that I had for those works. But I console myself with the notion that necessarily I'm a perpetual beginner, that maybe this is less unusual than one thinks, that it is close to the process of what happens to things in life, that it's a way of being alive, because once we settle for one of those fixed situations we're always looking for—that's a kind of death. The energy of life, whatever else, is constantly new, is constantly begin, begin, begin, begin. I used to think fourteen books ahead. I've forgotten what most of those are because they were really fourteen of the same kind of books, and I picked one. Now I'm thinking, at most, one and a half books ahead, and there's a dreadful desert beyond that, and I think what if, at that point, that's it, and I can't think of anything else. I can think of thousands of things to do, but none which interests me sufficiently to do well. I don't know if this is just a gradual diminution of my own ability or if it's the right thing, but I'm stuck with it. At least you see it in the other arts and it may be a very commonplace experience. It's said over and over, and this shows up in his journals and letters, that after each of Beethoven's great symphonics and then the quartets that he had been so totally committed to that particular piece of work that he had these long periods in which he said he didn't believe he'd ever do another piece of music.

I abstractly dream of an ideal for all writers, and that's to feel totally empty. The guy who saves it hasn't pushed himself to the edge. I used to run the quarter mile, I was never any good at it in terms of times, but the ideal at any distance other than the 100 or 220 was to breast the tape precisely one step before the step which would carry you into unconsciousness. Not to fall down unconscious early, not to fall down unconscious at all, because you hit the finish line precisely one step before that. I think that's the writer's dream, and thus the worldly wise and the sharp and the shrewd, I guess, are those who have never had a kick left at the end of the race. They've run a good time and have plenty left and they'll run again. But there's something deeply unsatisfying about that, no matter how fast you are, something very unsatisfying if you've never pushed yourself to your limit. And that's what I want for myself. Of course it may not look like that to the reader, it shouldn't, it should look like a good race or a good dance or anything else. Ideally it shouldn't call attention to itself, it should look graceful.

Drape yourself with chains, then dance so that they don't clink.

Right, that precisely the aim. But for yourself, for the writer, it should be that one breathless second away. That's what you're pushing for all the time. Nobody ever gets there, or very few. And a great irony is that they are the only ones who know it, if they're any good.

Then, in a sense, after you've done a particular piece, even something, or, maybe, especially something as big as Death of the Fox, twenty years of work, once it is done it doesn't, in this one sense, matter anymore?

It doesn't matter at all.

Do you lose interest in it and start moving forward?

That's right. Oh, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pleased that some people liked it, I'd be foolish to say that, though I like the new book more, whatever the new book is. I'm hoping the new book, the next one, will be for me—I'm not worrying about readers or the publisher—for me I hope it will be a better experience, better and different.