SOURCE: Stone, Robert, David Pink, and Chuck Lewis. “An Interview with Robert Stone.” Salmagundi 108 (fall 1995): 117-39.

[In the following interview, Stone discusses the creation and characters of Outerbridge Reach, his approach to writing, his moral, political, and artistic concerns, American poetry, the formal education of writers, and the difficulty of the writing life.]

We met with Robert Stone a couple of years ago at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was the last city in his national tour for Outerbridge Reach. He emerged from the lobby elevator wearing dark aviator glasses, a light dress shirt, gray slacks, and tennis shoes. We sat in a dark, quiet corner of the empty hotel lounge, set up our recorders, and told him a little about ourselves and our interest in his work. To break the ice we offered him one of the exotic sodas we'd brought along with us from the Jamaican deli down the block (he chose the grapefruit). At first we thought he might be either tired or wary—it was hard to tell because of the dark glasses—but we were both struck by how focused and considered his responses were. Stone seemed to warm up to us, and we counted it as a success that, in time, the sunglasses came off.

[Pink and Lewis]: How hard is it for you to have one of your characters die?

[Stone]: Very difficult. It's hard emotionally and psychologically. It really takes a lot out of me.

Arthur Miller said that “a little death helps,” meaning that the audience won't be ‘satisfied’ or won't really get the writer's message if it doesn't involve that kind of intensity. Do you see it that same way?

No. I don't know. Often I wonder if there isn't a way to get my characters back, to save them. But often when I try thinking events through in that way, I realize that the character is truly cornered, and no matter how much I might want him to have an insight and settle for his own imperfections in the world, what happens to him just seems to be inevitable, no matter how much I'd like things to be different for him. Sometimes I start with knowing what I think will happen to a character, and grow increasingly despairing when I realize that what I thought will happen will indeed happen. Events, in a novel, should seem to have a certain inevitability after the fact.

That's something that someone might say about the ‘Stonian’ universe, that no one gets out alive. It's like life.

Yeah, it's like life. I mean, you don't get out alive. I really don't see a lot of people getting a long-term upper hand. I see a lot of people who are really coping very bravely and somewhat often successfully with life, but I'm really not seeing any Happy Endings, capital “H,” capital “E.” Most of the people I know do their best, and they sort of come to an accommodation and they work out their lives but they have lots of trouble. People have a lot of trouble. I don't feel particularly depressed or despairing, but philosophically I'm sort of on the pessimistic side, meaning that I think it's a lot tougher to behave well than most people think, and life at the best of times is often lonely and dangerous, and we're just out here in this phenomenology without much of a context that we can be sure of. These are all difficulties. Although I don't see much opportunity for human nature changing, that doesn't mean that I think life is shit or that I'm consumed with despair.

In Outerbridge Reach you veer away from the violence and drug-taking that marked your previous territory. Does that describe your own evolution as an artist—deciding to go somewhere else—or does that say something about the contemporary landscape, in terms of the moral corrosiveness working its way up?

It seems as if every age has its own difficulties. Browne, in Outerbridge Reach, has to discover his own affinity with truth. When he says, “the truth is my bride,” he really is alien to deception, though he has been in a world of casual deception all of his life. One thing I've been thinking a lot about—and I don't mean to make banal political points all the time because I think that this book is political only in a very broad way as a kind of social comment—but I really find it chilling when a President, for example, says, “I am the education President,” or “I am the environmental President,” or “I am the health President.” There's the sense that his words mean absolutely nothing. This is the kind of preppy or otherwise empty babble that the doctor mumbles to you when the situation is dire—“you're going to be OK, blah, blah, blah”—that kind of thing. It is utter babble, the opposite of what is really true. So the President's speech consists of “Blah, blah, whatever you want to hear. Blah, blah, blah, whatever I'm supposed to say.” And he might as well just about be saying, “Blah, blah, blah, whatever my speech writer writes tomorrow for me to say. Blah, blah, blah, I'm saying it.” That's the level on which these leaders of the free world typically operate, and that's absolutely chilling. So Browne is in this world of meaningless words, where all meanings are the reverse of what is declared. And nobody cares, no one pays attention because everybody knows that everyone lies. Strickland comes in to this in a way to catch out Browne at his pretensions. Strickland ends up being the only one in the novel who really understands what has happened.

What is that like for you as an artist, trying to say something about our times by rendering a new landscape? Thorne, for example, seems to be a new kind of a character for you.

Yes, he is a somewhat different character for me.

Did he evolve for you as a character? Did he start out as kind of a ballbusting corporate type and move into somebody who became more sympathetic?

Yes, I think he did change. I wasn't sure what role to have him play, but he ends up being a figure of some rectitude. I wouldn't say that he started out as a worse kind of person, but he did certainly change over time.

You became more interested in him?

I became more interested in him. His was a point of view that I wanted in the novel. I even tell the story from his point of view at times, the only departure from that of the three main characters.

In a 1982 interview you quote the reply Malraux received from a priest to whom he put the question: Considering that you have heard thousands of confessions, what have you learned about humanity? The Priest says, “We're all a lot worse than we seem, and we all remain children.” Both Browne and Strickland seem manifestations of what Malraux's priest says about the human condition. Do you see them in that way?

There's a way in which they both carry their childhoods around with them, as is the case with most of us. But they become doppelgangers for each other. They end up in the same vortex. Strickland begins to see that his situation is more and more like Browne's, especially when he comes to completely understand what Browne set out to do. Progressively, in spite of his arguing against Browne, Strickland begins to see the ways in which they are alike; for example, they're both trying to bring something off on a large scale. Strickland, who's not a nice guy, develops a great deal of empathy for Browne by the end.

That's interesting, because Strickland at one point says that he doesn't care about anyone or anything except the truth, as it is filtered through his perception. On that count, he seems quite different from the majority of your characters. The rest seem to have much more in common with, say, former President George Bush, empty forms in search of their substance. Do you like or admire Strickland?

I don't like him, but I think that for a reader he has a couple of appealing characteristics. For one thing he's entertaining. He's funny, he's a ballbuster, he's amusing. In terms of liking him, I hope that he compels from the reader a certain limited sympathy based on his being a real artist, one who has the imagination and the perception to involve himself in self-suffering, and to make something concrete out of that suffering. His dynamic is perception; he sees, he understands—a lot. The reader should recognize that in Strickland, but not like him and not necessarily admire him. But the reader should be entertained by him; one of his functions is to switch the sensibility, to provide a certain salt and bitter perspective to the story. He's necessary to make the story harder—otherwise, the story would have been quite a bit softer, potentially bordering on the sentimental. In order to get what is poignant and sad—the true sentiment of the story—I need to undercut it with a hard, jaundiced point of view just to make the balance come out right. So Strickland is absolutely necessary to the story.

Along those same lines, Browne seems a bit of a new character for you in that he doesn't intentionally screw up his perceptions with drugs or alcohol. Was that a conscious move on your part?

Browne is not a guy who takes drugs, and he doesn't much drink; it would be out of character for him to do any of those things. He's a guy at a yacht brokerage who went to Annapolis, he's just not a guy who smokes dope or drinks a lot. It just went with the story. It wasn't a matter of making a decision whether or not this guy should be smoking dope all the time, he just wasn't going to be doing that.

Perhaps the question would be better framed against Children of Light. In that novel it seems that everybody is stumbling through life with their perceptions altered and a bit addled by drugs. Did you decide on some level that the next novel would involve a central character like Browne, someone who is the kind of guy who would go to Annapolis, who is preppy, and yet has the same difficulty in coming to terms with his life and the world as do those characters in your other novels, the ones who do take drugs and drink too much?

Yeah, at a sales conference for the book I joked that Browne was my contribution to the war on drugs, that my characters would engage in less substance abuse. But it really comes down to my having carried this situation where a guy fakes his position in a race—something that really happened in the 60's—for 25 years. So when I set out to do that story it was going to be involve somebody who sailed; it was just going to be set in a different world. I wasn't interested in making the character anything like the guy who really did it, who was in fact kind of a shady, ambiguous, talkative bullshitter. I wasn't going to make Browne an operator or any kind of hipster at all. I wanted to make him a guy who has tried to play the game, and who in a way is let down by it—by the ironies of the game. Such a person is not outside the compass of my sympathy. Browne became a different character from many of the ones I've written about because he came with the story; he just wasn't going to do any of those things.

Would you speak about your experiences as a writer of both long and short fiction, in particular how you manage yourself over the long haul of the novel, both emotionally and physically?

There were times when I was writing this book when I felt like I had somehow gotten myself into some terrible trouble. I would wake up in the morning with that feeling. I can't remember quite what it was, but it was a feeling that I was in some real trouble that I had to somehow get myself out of. It was hard. I mean I really felt that if I had blown it, if I reached a point where I was unable to go on and I couldn't think of what would happen next or the whole process blew up on me, then I would have been left high and dry. This is the hardest book I've ever done, not only because it was emotionally draining sometimes, but because it was hard to figure out what the hell was going to happen, what the diagram was, what the next scene should be. It took a lot of rewriting. I remember after having made final corrections on the galleys, my wife Janice and I were driving them to my publisher, and she said that she hated to see it all settled, with everybody's fate sealed. We got very involved in it emotionally.

Is that fear of being left high and dry something that you have to come to terms with?

Yes. If you're trying to do something that's of some consequence, you're trying to make something, you always run the risk of failing, and the risk of failing is frightening. Here I have this book that I decide that I want to do, of some ambition and scope, and it always seemed to me that the whole thing might just blow up on me, that I might just fail. This is an anxiety. Any artist depends, to a very large extent, on confidence. Some days you're more confident than others. You face days when you sit there and you say to yourself, I can't do this, nobody is going to buy this stuff, nobody's going to believe in these people, nobody's going to be interested in this world; you just completely lose confidence.

How about the other end, the euphoric end of the rollercoaster?

And then there is the euphoric end where you think, Wow! this is good, this is great! (laughter). It's always sort of a long delay. One of the troubles with writing is that you do this all by yourself. You have these tremendous mood swings from despair to euphoria. It's one of the reasons writers drink, because you've got to bring yourself down. You can finish your day and you're completely manic, or completely depressed. And where do you go? You don't get on a train and leave and go home. You don't change your scene. You don't stop working.

What do you do in the afternoons to come down? Do you walk your dogs?

Yeah, I used to do that, when I was living more in the country. What I mostly do is read. I haven't gotten much exercise since I've been traveling, but I try to do that. Sometimes I go and swim. Sometimes I go jump around at the “Y.” Sometimes aerobics. That's a pretty good way of doing it. And I like to walk in the woods. And sort of mess around in the water—although I don't have a boat right now. But down in the Keys, I just go swimming.

Your mentioning your wife reminds me of a remark by Michael Herr calling your wife the “patron saint of writers' wives.”

Yeah, I got shit about that.

Yeah, I imagine so, but I also think for a lot of writers it's a frequent question because there is that sense of partnership in general and its relationship to different kinds of work. Could you elaborate on that?

Well, she's working for me now as an editorial assistant. She used to be a children's protection service worker. She was spending her whole day working with abused kids, which was shattering for her. In a way, we were both doing stuff that was pretty difficult to talk about. I was sort of writing and she was having to confront people who were doing these things to their kids. Her work was very tough—one of those “somebody's got to do it” kind of things—a real burnout job. But now that she's working for me, she really helps me out a lot. I really trust her sensibility. She's my first reader. I hadn't really done a whole lot of the book before she read any of it. It's really useful to have somebody whose opinion you respect whom you can talk to about what works and what doesn't.

But finally you have to make the decisions yourself, which is what art is all about, a series of decisions. That is one of the scary things about it. Nobody likes making decisions, at least I don't. All art—all writing—involves deciding to do one thing rather than another in order to create a certain thing. If you're wrong about it or you make a mistake—the wrong mistake—you can ruin the whole thing. It's very tension-inducing. But, you know, it's very rewarding too. Nothing is free, but I mean there is an “up” side.

You're making all those decisions—all those lefts and rights all through the novel. Is that one of the problems of working on the novel, the consequences of those decisions, the way they stack up? Is there a difference between early decisions and later decisions? Do you worry about the early ones more?

It's hard if you've done a hundred pages in the wrong direction. And that's happened to me before. It's really tough to make that decision and say, “Okay, this is just wrong and I have to go back there and do it over.” Sometimes you can undo things. You can't undo central things from which everything else proceeds, but there are certain things, there is a degree of arbitrariness. It's really surprising sometimes how much you can cut and paste and shift in a novel. But decisions always.

To return to your characters and their use of alcohol and drugs, at the same time that they're seeking an understanding of themselves and the world, they're using drugs of various kinds. Is there a connection?

Well, people are often after transcendence, and people who get intoxicated are in pursuit of something better than what they have, they're attempting to change their reality, their perception. They're after something, they're reacting to a sense of dissatisfaction with the world and with the way things are. And they want to liberate their sensibilities, but then they are at the mercy of the forces they've liberated.

Your novels are a kind of moral fiction, and yet very few of the characters tell us how to live sanely—unless it's a part of your purposes to teach or at least gesture toward how to do that by negative example.

Well, there's more to it than that. Essentially, I'm telling stories, and you can't be too didactic. All you're trying to do is to get people to pay attention. I'm certainly not the kind of writer who has a moral, as it were. It's just a process of reflection on the human condition, how you start something in motion … Positive and negative have no meaning except by contrasts. I don't think anybody's ever written a good book of much interest with characters you're supposed to emulate. That's Horatio Alger. I'm not trying to teach, I'm essentially trying to tell stories that encourage people to reflect, basically because they enjoy it.

So you don't see yourself as a moralist?

What I am essentially—foremost—is an entertainer. What I do has to be entertaining. If it's not entertainment, regardless of how high-minded it may be, it's not going to work. Entertainment can be serious. The instinct toward entertainment—the instinct toward play—is a very central and important thing in human life. So what I do has to entertain, and I try to tell good stories.

You're saying that you're offering entertainment, but your sense of story and play and their relationship to human life is much more serious than a Horatio Alger fantasy. For example, we've discussed the connection between chemical use and transcendence. That's what I admire in your work, you frequently explore that connection in the most excruciating ways, and play out its difficulties. I admire you for it, and yet I wondered if with Anne you saw a chance for something different—when I got done I thought, shit, hers is one story which isn't one of those macho adventure trips some readers see in your other stories. She's a character who could have taken the same chemical-fueled journey towards transcendence—but without the dislocation and isolation of leaving home. That would have been a much quieter, internal kind of story. It seems like you've been after that issue, that it's of concern to you, and I'm wondering if you'll ever take it on head on. Or whether you don't really want to go into that box.

Which issue do you mean?

She seems to be the only character who goes into—alcoholism.

Oh, I see.

And then it appears at the end that she's going to get it together.

Yeah, she's going to sail around the world, and she's going to do it successfully. She's going to be in ten years an extremely interesting person. I mean, having survived all this and having sailed around the world.

In a good boat!

Presumably the boat she's going to get will hold up (laughter). She's going to get a better boat.

I hope you'll be in a good mood.

(Laughter) Well, I'm not going to do it, it's not going to be written. But that's what I see happening. In ten years from now, Anne is going to be a very interesting person. Whatever her life is going to be then, she's going to be able to cope. She's going to be a little on the hard side—a little on the tough side—after all, she's going to survive. She's going to win over adversity. But I don't necessarily want to explore substance abuse as the theme. I've done a great deal of that and I don't think it's endlessly interesting. I'm really more interested in other things. But I think it will remain a feature to some extent, because that's a world I knew a lot about.

Your stories employ the notion of the “quest” frequently, with a lot of mobility and adventure and going out into the world. Would you ever want to write a book that “stays at home”? Does that interest you?

I don't think I would do that, no, in the normal course of things. I like the quest stories. I'm not inclined toward stories where everybody stays home, which is not to say you can't stay home and have a quest, but for my own purposes, for my own plots, I really prefer stories where there are adventures of some kind, where people move, where people have encounters.

The theme of American empire, for instance, in A Flag for Sunrise, is focused on “down there.” Is Outerbridge Reach an attempt to look at ourselves “here” and to take a more domestic view?

Well, you could say that, in terms of a look at late twentieth-century America, but it's only political in the larger sense. This country is very resilient. It can endure a great deal. Americans tend to be apocalyptic—when things go badly, we tend to think, Christ, everything's falling apart. Look at France and Germany, look at what they've been through. It's unbelievable that those two countries could survive, given their history of the past seventy-five years. It's pretty spectacular. Look at Germany now. They've survived a lot more than we've had to.

Current events sometimes make me think again of A Hall of Mirrors. Racial violence is still with us, along with other bad problems.

Yeah. Things have not changed. In some ways the state of various black communities throughout the country has not improved. And as the immigration increases from Asia and Latin America, American blacks in a certain way will be even more diminished. I've been spending most of my time in New York, and there you can see how the Asians have been hustling to get their business together and make a living and so forth. And the blacks don't like it very much. With the new wave of immigrants, the government is if anything even less concerned with the condition of blacks. It doesn't bode well for that community. I don't know what's going to happen.

I want to jump to the question of writers and their connection to various institutions. Specifically, what do you think about writing programs and workshops—what can be good about them, what might not be so good?

Well, it's a tough question. Everyone feels uncertain about it. I don't think it ever hurt anyone. But you really can't teach people to write, I think everybody recognizes that. But you can encourage. One thing about a writing program is that, as a student, people will take your writing seriously, there is an atmosphere in which you can talk about your writing and get your writing done. What I try to do in my courses is talk about rhetoric, or to use Poe's phrase, “the philosophy of composition.” But one thing I cannot do is “instruct”—there is no technology. You can only talk about principles. You can do that. There is such a thing as rhetoric, you can talk about rhetoric and it really works. But you can't instruct someone to be a writer. You can train some kind of sensibility or ethic, or encourage people to train themselves, but it's an autonomous operation. There's not too much you can instruct people about. You can talk about writing and maybe that will result in some sort of useful experience.

For instance?

I think the most effective lesson I ever had in writing was when I got my feelings hurt. Nobody likes to do that, at least very few people, and I'm certainly not one to spend two or three days in a workshop that is going to make me feel bad, but you know the old story about Benvenuto Cellini walking down the street with his father as a little boy. They see a salamander and his father whacks him and the boy asks his father, “What did you do that for?” and his father says, “Because now you'll remember that you saw a salamander” (laughter). And all the lessons I learned, all the stuff I was doing wrong, that I got nailed on, I never did again. It always resulted in my feeling embarrassed, of being humiliated, of looking dumb, and those are the most useful lessons I learned. But not too many people are willing to do that. In a way, the less considerate teacher is the teacher who makes it easy, who goes into the classroom and wants to be a good guy and everybody has this vaguely agreeable time and nothing happens. In a way, it's much tougher to say, look, you're doing this all wrong, wise up. And then people say, “What a prick!” But that's more considerate, that's really the more dedicated teacher.

Do you get something out of teaching? Obviously you don't need to for financial reasons anymore.

Yeah, teaching clears my mind so that I can find out about what I think. I talk about a whole lot of things.

What was your experience like, going from working in New York to attending Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow?

The life I lived in New York was miles away from the world of books and publishers and teachers. I'd never really seen this very comfortable middle-class life that I saw around the Stanford campus and the suburbs of San Francisco. It was really unlike anything I'd ever seen before. In those days, you realize, I was married, I had a small child, and we had to work, you had to work hard. We had no resources we could turn to, we had no help from family. We were living in New York at the time on the Lower East Side doing jobs we didn't like that we had to do. And to get out to California where there was this tremendous leeway—where people were really having fun. We had gotten married very young, as in those days people like us did, and so we had very little youthful, college-age fun. My wife was holding a job, I'm trying to write, and we were taking care of the kid. And then we go out to California and there's this sybaritic pleasure and fun. It was wonderful to be out there, just terrific. I remember it as everything turning from black and white into technicolor. It was lavish and extremely comfortable. In the early sixties in California there was really a sense of paradise.

So it was as if the gates had opened and you went through?

I felt that something very good had happened to me. I really needed a lot of help to get that first book done. I needed some support from the world and the world does not usually give you support. And here I had moved out to California and had a stipend from the fellowship. What happened then was that Houghton Mifflin was scouting writing programs looking for new writers. Wallace Stegner was asked who was working on a book that should be looked at, and he said, “Why don't you check out Stone's book,” and so I ended up with a publisher. Inside of those two years I went from nominal graduate student at Stanford to a published author—life changed a lot.

It's almost a cliché today about how difficult it is to get published if you're a serious writer. Do you think the publishing scene was just as tough then?

Oh, I think it was pretty nearly as tough. I still think it's the case where if somebody has something really strong, it's going to get published. It may take a little longer, but if somebody has some real knockout stuff, it'll get found. The thing is, readers of serious fiction are on the margin, and the serious novel is where poetry was a long time ago. A book needs to sell 100,000 copies now, that's standard, and 40,000 copies for a serious novel is considered very good. Also, they expanded the hardcover book into the paperback market, so you get these remaindered trasho super-romances that occupy a lot of the retail energy, especially in the chains. And also the purchase of publishers by large corporations—especially foreign corporations—means they have no stake or interest in American fiction. Foreign owners can come in and buy publishing houses and they look entirely at the numbers. Some German publisher figures, “Fuck the Americans, Americans don't care about literature anyway, they have no culture. So, you know, screw them and their fiction. How much do we make?”

Do you think it's a part of the “dumbing down” of America?

(laughter) Yeah, there is a touch of that. Popular culture has not gotten any more acute. They even want to do away with PBS. Like whoever it was from the Heritage Foundation who said that Sesame Street was not a better show than Underdog or the Jetsons.

Your mentioning poetry earlier interests me. Somebody said once that poetry is like when you're first dating and prose is for when you get married. Do you write poetry much now?

I don't write poetry so much. I rarely sit down and write a poem. I wrote a lot of poetry when I was first beginning, and in a fit or something I destroyed it all. However, I've managed to bring it back and use it in some form or another in my prose. A lot of the prose I write is imagistic and poetic in nature. There's a lot of poetry in my prose. So I don't isolate the poetry, I tend to use it as blank verse in my prose.

Obviously you appreciate poetry a great deal, you quote it in your work, and I think in Children of Light you even write one part where you're rhyming every line, almost as if to say, “Hey, you're reading poetry and you don't even know it right now, fellah.” I wonder if you have any kind of comment about the way poetry is disappearing from the scene.

I think it's very bad. For example, the way the New York Times Book Review is not reviewing poetry very much at all these days. I think that's shameful. They really should be reviewing it more. I think a place has simply got to be made for American poetry. It has to be subsidized—by the publisher or by the government or somebody. We've got to have it, we absolutely got to have it. We cannot exist without poetry. It's not an acceptable situation to stand by and watch all commercial viability of poetry disappear. It's not that everybody will be able to support themselves solely with their poetry, but you have to have some support for it. Somebody's got to buy it, it requires patronage.

Are there contemporary poets you like to read?

Yeah, James Tate. I like Tate's poetry. I like Galway Kinnell, who is a quite different kind of poet. I like some of [James] Merrill's poems too. Those are three. Of course they're very well known and everybody who reads reads them.

Have you thought about playing with fictional forms more, maybe pushing that envelope even further so that it becomes more like poetry or more metafictional or experimental?

Yes, I did that in a way in my first novel, it was full of stuff like that. I did it less in some of the others, although a little more in Outerbridge Reach. I may very well do that in the future.

Now that you're this successful as a novelist, it seems as if you might be more free to take risks—

Take some chances, yeah.

What do you imagine those risks being?

Well, what happens is, you get held to the standard of your best work. And it's not fun to receive a review that begins, “What a disappointment.” But you have to be willing to face that. You can't set out to just make critics happy, then you're wasting your time. You have to take some risks. Writers who get good reviews get reinforced, and you get to think you're cute, you think you can do no wrong and you can indulge all your hobbyhorses and all your notions. This is one of the things that to some extent happened to Vonnegut, whose whimsy got a little bit labored because that was what he was valued for. You have to watch out for what people say you do well, because then you become less self-critical.

What do you think those areas are for you—what do you need to keep an eye out for?

Well, I think it's necessary that I not have too many drug-addled scenes where people's cerebrations are triggered by drugs—not to avoid it altogether but just not to rely on it as a way of getting into a liberating sensibility. I don't know, the thing is, the nature of risk is that your potential bad stuff is very close to your good stuff—it's just like your good stuff except that it doesn't work. It's kind of an ineffable thing to talk about. How could what I do be made not to work? (laughter) You'd have to see it on the page, you'd have to say, “Well, this is obviously Stone, but it doesn't work,” and then you'd know what it was that I can do wrong.

Would you describe your ideal Stone reader?

Somebody who really has a lot of resemblances psychologically to me. Somebody with a sense of humor. Somebody who takes pleasure in words. Somebody who knows something about the secrets of the heart. That's about it. I've always felt very warmly about my readers, I still do. There's this small band of pilgrims out there—there are more of them now, but I'm always moved when I see people who have read the early stuff and come to the readings.

A lot of people bring up Melville when they discuss your work. Besides the obvious parallels of the sea, I'm interested in how the hallucinatory eeriness in Outerbridge Reach resembles Moby Dick. In D. H. Lawrence's essay on Melville, for instance, he talks about the “sheer physical, vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvelous wireless station. … the extreme transitions of the isolated, far-driven soul. … All this practicality in the service of a mad mad chase.” Were you going after some of that?

I can't really say. There are themes in Melville I have no hesitation addressing, because they're part of the American tradition, particularly the marine literature, so it's quite natural to invoke them. But in terms of style and language, there's no conscious reference to Melville, although I do quote, as in that hallucinatory sequence towards the end of the novel in which Browne talks about coming back from the Japan ground, which is where the Pequod is chasing Moby Dick.

You've said somewhere that you're going to work on a book of short stories. Is that right?

That's one of the things I'm thinking of doing. I have a contract, but I could go ahead and do a novel first, that would be okay.

So it wasn't necessarily a plan of yours to provide a release or relief from novels for awhile?

I may do that. I haven't really made up my mind. I have five published stories, but that's not enough for a collection. If I do three or four more, and I have eight or nine, that would be enough, and I'd publish them.

You work in a lot of different forms, which I find interesting. There are the novels, essays, short stories, and travel pieces. Clearly you could stay with the novel, so what do you get from those other kinds of writing?

I like the essay because it gives me the chance to be directly political, to talk about politics, to write about different cities, which I like. And to hold forth. For instance, Havana or the 1988 Republican convention—I just like to comment that way, comment directly.

Does it help with your fiction?

I don't know, not necessarily.

More of a vacation from fiction?

Yeah.

Here's a classic question: Young writers are always looking for advice. Have any you want to give?

I think you have to keep doing it. The hardest thing is to keep writing. Many people write for a while, but they usually stop. It's hard to think of what advice to give to young writers, except to stay with it—and to read, to keep reading, to read your favorites. Everybody has their masters and that's who you read. I think it's good to open oneself to experiences, to travel, to see the different levels of life, and to keep reading and to keep writing. However you make time for it, it's hard.

Concerning getting published, many young writers are worried or disgruntled enough to believe that it's a stacked deck or a rigged game, that once a week a bulldozer goes through the Paris Review offices and pushes all the manuscripts into the dumpster, and that if you don't have the kind of experience you had, where a writer of the stature of Wallace Stegner recommends you, that it's almost impossible.

Some places are really great. The New Yorker, for example, under Shawn, and it continues. It's a wonderful place for unsolicited manuscripts. They read them and they publish over-the-transom stuff all the time. They will really give a story a reading regardless of who sent it in or where it comes from—they're really good that way. And there are other places like that. Connections are always nice, and there's the matter of luck, but it's not strictly true that you always have to know somebody. On the other hand, The New Yorker gets literally thousands of stories every month, but they read them, they really do read them. They're very considerate to writers, at least they used to be. I hope they stay that way.

What do you do after you've put out a book like this and finished a tour? Do you just get away from it all for a while?

Yeah, I want to go to the beach (laughter). You know, drink beer all day and do absolutely nothing.

Maybe the final question: To bring up the ghost of Hemingway, that poor soul, he said that explaining his own work only served to put out of work the professional explainers, and yet you don't seem to mind talking about your own work.

No. What does it say in the Declaration of Independence—“the proper respect for the opinions of mankind”? No, I don't mind trying to talk about it.