[In the following interview with Vorda, conducted February 19, 1987, Apple discusses contemporary fiction and his own writing.]

Max Apple was born October 22, 1941, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he spent his childhood and youth. He attended the University of Michigan, and received his first significant attention as a writer by earning several Hopwood Awards, as well as his Ph.D., in 1970. Since 1972 he has taught at Rice University where he holds the title of Fox Professor of English Literature. He has published four books: The Oranging of America (1976), a collection of short stories; Zip (1978), a novel; Free Agents (1984), a collection of prose pieces; and The Propheteers (1987), a novel.

The following interview took place on February 19, 1987, in the English Department at Rice University.

[Vorda]: What are your feelings about contemporary fiction? Do you feel comfortable with labels like metafiction or experimental fiction, which are sometimes applied to your work?

[Apple]: The truth is, I don't like to categorize. I'm as likely to enjoy fiction that is old-fashioned as something avant-garde. My current colleague Lynne Sharon Schwartz' novel Disturbances in the Field is perfectly realistic, conventional narrative and could have been written, stylistically speaking, in the nineteenth century. It's wonderful. It is a great novel in the way that George Eliot's and Joseph Conrad's novels are great—intricate plot, richly realized characters, acute social commentary. So I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate Frederick Barthelme or Raymond Carver and other writers who shade away from the mainstream. I consider what I do as sometimes experimental, sometimes very conventional.

Or post-modernist?

I was invited to write “Post-Modernism” [reprinted in Free Agents] for a panel discussion at a museum. First, I went to a library to find out what post-modernism was. I ended up reading a book of literary criticism that used my work as an example. So I thought, if I'm part of it I ought to be able to describe it. But of course it's critics who make the categories. That's what I was playing with in the “Post-Modernism” piece: writers don't say, “Today I'm a realist” or “Now I'm going to write a minimalist story.” We write what we can, including the bad writers. I think Louis L'Amour might have his existentialist days and Judith Krantz now and then feels minimalist. You hope that the critics won't stick you with a label—Georgian poet, Decadent novelist—that will diminish you. You hope that like Dickens or Joyce your work will defy any one label and accommodate all of them.

The real question is, when will I have time to read all the contemporary fiction I want? I think there are an enormous number of good writers in the country today. I think this is a golden age in fiction writing. Some people are upset that there is no Faulkner they can pick out. Of course, in Faulkner's lifetime, until almost the end, no one picked him out either.

Would you be willing to name writers you admire? Or those who influenced you?

There are so many that I would just as soon not answer. I read my contemporaries with admiration and respect. I know a lot of them now, too. That's why I'd feel badly if I started giving a list and left some out.

I can tell you that when I was young, and by that I mean eighteen or so, it was a great discovery for me to find the Jewish writers. Not only Bellow and Malamud, but Herbert Gold. A whole group of writers who seemed so different from me, though their idioms and characters were intimately familiar.

I knew as a teenager that I was going to be a writer, whatever that meant. I was living close to stories. My grandmother was a great storyteller. And I knew that being a writer meant being a reader too. Reading was the most important thing in the world to me. When I was sixteen or seventeen I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't know when I read Dostoevsky that I was reading a translation. I just read any book I could find, and given my later practice, I was strangely attracted to immense realistic novels like Les Miserables. I made the jump, literally, from juvenile fiction to that book; I couldn't stop reading it. It turned out that I was reading great fiction though I didn't know it at the time.

I thought that real writers were not people like me. Essentially, I thought they were Englishmen or Frenchmen or Russians. I thought you had to be full of high seriousness like T. S. Eliot. Then when I got to college and took a closer look at all that high seriousness and great tradition, I knew I didn't belong to any of that. When you realize that you're not going to be writing about the Russian aristocracy or the French bourgeosie, you look around for models closer to home, and this is where Malamud and Gold, especially, were so helpful.

I feel enormously close to E. L. Doctorow's writing, too, both to the life he recounts, the autobiographical stuff, and to his style as a fiction writer. I also love Grace Paley's stories. Some of these stories just sing to me. Once I was teaching a short summer session at Berkeley with Grace Paley and Ed Doctorow. Students could go from one class to another. One student work called forth an allusion from me to a certain Chekhov story. Another student stood up and said, “This has got to be a fix. I was in Doctorow's class and Grace Paley's class and they were both talking about the same Chekhov story!” Of course, we had not mentioned it between us, but it shows our affinity as readers and writers.

The Oranging of America was one of the most distinctive collections of short stories in recent decades. I think it stands up there with Borges' Labyrinths and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. How did these stories develop?

I had a long apprenticeship, a quiet one. I tried to hide from being a writer. All the time I was working on my Ph.D. at Michigan I didn't send any stories to magazines. Finally, I knew when I was ready. I sent “The Oranging of America” to Ted Solotaroff at American Review, and after he published it, other stories came rapidly. When I started to be published I realized I had some readers. I wasn't alone, as I had been all those years in graduate school, writing my secret stuff in the back of my Shakespeare and Milton notebooks, almost as if it were Hebrew starting from the other side of the page. None of these stories was published—they were typical juvenilia set down in my mid-twenties without hope.

I felt I was going to be a writer someday, and I thought I was going to be a teacher, but I knew I was never going to be a literary critic. Writing a dissertation was a pose for me, but I wrote it on a text that was intriguing: The Anatomy of Melancholy, a seventeenth century book that addresses subjects I take up in The Propheteers. The career I have now is the one I still want. I still teach. I spend some hours almost every day being a writer, but I spend more hours being a reader. If you ask me what I am, I'm a reader.

Regarding your narrative style, you have said in an interview with The Mississippi Review (Fall 1984) that “Gas Stations” was a crucial story for you “because it was the first time I consciously trusted my fantastic impulses completely.” Can you elaborate on this statement? Does this following of fantastic impulses apply only to the short story?

I hope so. I don't want to follow too many fantastic impulses in the world, though I have them. About “Gas Stations,” Nora Ephron called me from Esquire, and said she liked my work and wanted to know if I'd write something for their bicentennial issue. She started running through a list of possible topics, which always strikes dread in my heart. I had never had anything published in any large circulation magazines. So I said I would write on gas stations, my suggestion. And yet I began to follow her advice in writing the essay; it was more than advice, it was directions. There was a lot of money at stake and I nervously produced a rather dull essay on gas stations, which I threw away. Then I wrote what I wanted. I remember this so distinctly because I sent it to her with trepidation—with real fear that I'd blown my big chance for money and fame.

I was on vacation when Nora tracked me down and told me how much she loved the piece. I said, “But it's not an essay.” She said, “Who cares! When it's that good, who cares!” That gave me a lot of confidence just at the time I needed to trust my own instincts and personal style. Maybe that dull essay would have been published anyway, but I wouldn't have emerged as a writer, following my own directions.

Speaking of editorial matters, I understand that your new novel The Propheteers was originally titled The Disneyad.

A lawyer for Harper & Row insisted on the change and I'm sure he was correct. The content of a book is protected by the first amendment, you can use the name Walt Disney in the text, but the book jacket and title are considered advertising. So using the name Disney might be construed as an infringement on what the Disney people own.

I couldn't think of any other title since I was so wedded to The Disneyad. I was in Buenos Aires when I got the call that I needed a new title. My children and I walked the streets, but we couldn't think of one. Ted Solotaroff, my editor, came up with the new title. I'm very satisfied with it, but all those years I had the book in mind it was The Disneyad to me and always will be.

I was trying to write a mock epic. Behind The Disneyad was The Iliad and The Aeneid, and another mock epic, The Dunciad, which is why the title was so important to me. Just as every reader or listener of Homer knew that there was a Troy that had fallen, and knew all of Priam's sons, so I'm counting on my readers to be familiar with Walt Disney and Disney World in Orlando. Of course there's a big difference between Troy and Disney World—that's part of what the novel is about, part of its Kafkaesque and modernist comedy.

The use of popular culture in contemporary fiction is a fascinating subject.¹ Your novel contains some household words as characters: Howard Johnson, Walt Disney, Clarence Birdseye, C. W. Post, and Margery Post Merriweather. Why did you select these historical figures and did you research their lives for accuracy?

No I didn't research them. I didn't even know Margery Post had met Birdseye. I like the names. I always liked the name Birdseye and that little trademark has been in my mind since I was a kid. The disclaimer at the beginning of the novel, where I said that I was mostly acquainted with these people from my breakfast table, is the truth. I grew up in Grand Rapids, which is down the road from Battle Creek, and one of the earliest trips I took was to a cereal factory. People like the Posts and Kelloggs have been in my mind since childhood. Obviously they are easily recognizable symbols of American success, and for that reason I can use them, as names or ciphers, not as realistic historical figures. I wanted to suggest that what motivates people who become household words is something more complicated than money. If I called those characters John Smith or Allan Vorda or Max Apple, I would have to treat them more realistically, perhaps write about them as people who do want to earn money. I don't believe anybody does anything for money. I know that sounds perfectly crazy. I mean everyday people, men and women who go to work in the morning to a store or factory, work for money. But someone who has ninety motels: Why do they want ninety-one or ninety-two or ninety-three? Or if someone has Disneyland, why do they want Disney World? I'm just trying to imagine what it would be like because I think all of us everyday people know why we work. We work for a paycheck every week or every two weeks, but if I had one hundred million dollars or five hundred million dollars I'd still work. You'd still work. Why does a writer with three books want another one? It's the same thing. Why does someone who's drawn a series of cartoons want to draw another one? What's the blank page or the open celluloid? Those are life and death questions. I can't just state them baldly, theologically, or religiously. There's no way to do it.

The novel becomes a vision of what life is. Now maybe I've romanticized it, sentimentalized it. Maybe these moguls are awful people. No doubt some of them are. I read the paper too; and, unfortunately, I've met some of them.

I was looking for a vision that is generous. I honestly believed from the few things I know about Post or Kellogg that they still held an idea of making money for the sake of stewardship. C. W. Post believed very seriously that the world would be better if animals weren't killed. For me this makes Post a much more interesting character. So he's not a case study in how to get rich or what money is. That is what most popular fiction, what little I've read, is about—rich people and how they got rich. You know, the page-turning best-sellers by people like Judith Krantz.

I wanted to write another version of this fundamental American story. I was interested in the concept of money, but in a different way. I was interested in why C. W. Post didn't want his money. Why money doesn't mean anything to him or to Howard Johnson or, finally, Walt Disney. When I was creating Walt Disney I was trying to make a portrait of the artist. I think Disney was a great artist. You know Whitman's remark that “money is a form of poetry”? What if getting rich is not the sordid thing it's depicted to be in so many American novels? Or say that wealth might serve a writer now as Priam's wealth served Homer, as an opportunity to investigate the whole national character, its sweetness, its pathos, and its existential terrors. Maybe that's what more formula writers ought to be doing in their novels? I'm just asking.

That's an unusual perspective on modern America.

Perhaps it's because, although I was born in the United States, I've lived so close to an immigrant generation. My first language is Yiddish. I'm still fascinated by America in the way an immigrant is. I didn't eat in a restaurant until I went to college. America is still new and interesting to me. I don't see it the way a lot of other people do. Even in middle age I'm not quite jaded yet by the everyday world. I've internalized my grandmother's attitude about America, which is looking at it with wonder, stupor, and some satire.

The ending of The Propheteers is somewhat demonic. Walt is mildly electrocuting the Disney children who wait to return for more electrical-shock treatment. “As awful as it looked,” you write, “as awful as it was, he was giving them what they wanted.” Can you elaborate on this unconventional ending?

I think the quote says all I can say. I wanted the end to be both a surprise and inevitable. That is, here we have the world as it is. I've showed in the novel that Walt Disney, who's depressed and brooding on death, is an artist who can't help but wonder what happens when he erases a line, thereby raising existential and metaphysical issues. He is not a happy man. So we wonder: What is the magic of Walt Disney? Like any artist, he works in loneliness. He works in that dreamy, dark undercurrent that produces both great joy and inexplicable despair. Margery Post, by contrast, works in a straightforward way. Money can do this: power can do this. I'll hire the lawyers. She understands the world, she thinks. So when there is a confrontation. I wanted it to be a confrontation between the artist and the world.

Disney makes the analogy on pp. 166–67 that the artist is like God drawing lines (life) and then erasing them (death). And in Chapter 19, Nurse Bloom is unable to get any blood from Disney. Essentially, he is like an animated character, isn't he?

Exactly. I wanted him to be as lifeless, as full of death, as I possibly could. It's the blank page idea again. The novel in part is about how the imagination creates words, people, out of nothing, as God did the world. So for all that I've made an anatomy of melancholy in Disney's character, I've also made the kind of affirmative statement, I hope, that I described earlier. It's a comic novel. Like the Disney children we're all attracted to humor and humorous people because we sense the sorrow and pain behind the humor, and that's real life.

You're fond of fanciful ways of saying something abstract.

Fanciful isn't the word. Maybe the word is epiphany, but I don't see it as quite that either. I read an interview with Gabriel García Márquez a few years ago and someone asked him a similar question. I'm not comparing myself to García Márquez, but he said that he needed to render reality through surreal images in order to be faithful to its eerie strangeness. In one particular episode every time the woman touches a glass the glass turns blue. That was the way he found for saying “falling in love,” for defamiliarizing it, as the critics say.

In my short story “Vegetable Love” the man and the waitress put on their running shoes and go off to Mexico. It means that his quest is for nothing less extravagant than the meaning of life. But if I put it like that, who'd want to read it? Who'd want to write it?

So I find a dramatic or metaphorical way of talking about. I hope, things that matter most to people. Poets get away with these tropes all the time. Really, twentieth century fictions owe a lot to the narrative stock-in-trade of poets, and makers of fairy tales and folklore.

Finally, what direction do you see your fiction going?

In an article I published this year in the New York Times Book Review I talked about finding my place on the dying body of fiction. This goes back to Henry James's phrase, about the novel being the body of American fiction. I said, “Finally, I found a place. It was under the left middle fingernail, an aging subdivision called ‘Jewish, Jewish-American, not so Jewish and not so American either.’ It was one of the noisiest sectors on the body, but I slipped in and found a place that had been vacated when the inhabitant moved to Hollywood. As crowded and argumentative as the subdivision was, I was relieved to have finally found my own place.”

In the act of writing a novel or story, I'm dreaming. I'm daydreaming. It's the most real, the most profound me there can be; which doesn't mean it's very real or very profound. I was learning, even before I went to the University of Michigan, how to tell a story and also what to leave out. I don't consider myself a master of this. I give myself assignments. They come from my unconscious and, when the raw materials are there, I work with it as well as I can. I'm still learning. I hope to learn to do this better and better. That's the work of my life. My writing are my motels. My hope is to have a chain.

Note

1. See the essay by Constance Pierce on this subject in part one of MQR's issue on “Contemporary American Fiction” (Fall 1987)—Ed.