Stuart Dybek is the author of two books of short fiction, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods and The Coast of Chicago, and a book of
poetry, Brass Knuckles. He has won
numerous awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim, an NEA
fellowship, a Nelson Algren Award, a PEN/Malamud Award and a lifetime
achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A first
generation Polish-American, he grew up on Chicago's Southwest Side, a place
magically located between realism and fantasy in his stories of urban life.
Barry Pearce interviewed him in Kalamazoo, where Dybek teaches at Western
Michigan University. OV: In your
intro to the last Ploughshares you
talked about maybe turning it into a forum on form. I found that interesting
because I was cruising around the Internet and found a short-short of yours,
"Lost," posted on a poetry web site, and there was a debate about
whether or not it was poetry and should be there-- SD: Well, I don't think that particular debate would have been useful
to me because I'd already gone through my own internal debate on that subject
and arrived at a conclusion, but I think that the general debate is, I guess,
important in that there's so much we're taught that we don't have the
opportunity to reflect on. You kind of inherit somebody else's positions, and
sometimes on close inspection, you realize that those positions need further
consideration in order to be helpful to you as a writer, and maybe even need
further consideration as far as attitudes that a readership has that might need
to be dismantled. That whole poetry-fiction debate is hardly new. It's at the
heart of the 20th century. Work that we've decided to call poetry, like William
Carlos Williams, I'm sure would have just seemed like chopped up prose to
somebody living in the time of John Keats. Conversely, some of the things that
Joyce wrote, huge passages of Finnegan ~
1441ke--if you define poetry as the lyric, and as writing in the lyric
mode--in many ways he's a more "poetic" writer, in terms of music,
than somebody like William Carlos Williams. You can write in the lyric mode,
the narrative mode, the discursive mode, the dramatic mode, and you can combine
them. It's the combinations and the interplay and the counterpoint that
interests me more than just sitting around worrying about the definitions of
genre. OV: A piece like "We Didn't," would you
consider that--it's much more lyric than most short stories. SD: Yeah, I consider it a short story that makes heavy use
of the lyric mode. One of the reasons it does is that it started out as a poem
and was tremendously inspired by another poem by Yehuda Amichai called "We
Did It." I actually incorporated the language of Amechi's poem and wove it
into "We Didn't." His poem has a slightly incantatory rhythm about
it, at least in translation, that found its way into the story. I'm not
particularly fond of allusion as a technique, for me it was more of an
ornamentation than anything--but once I decided to use allusion, I started
fooling around. I went back and I read, I think they're called Twenty-four Love Poems, whatever that
first book by Neruda is. I borrowed some of Neruda, and then I ended up
borrowing some of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, almost in a tongue-in-cheek way. OV: In
addition to combining modes, you also seem to sort of switch modes. l'm
thinking of the end of "Chopin in Winter," which seems to me--not
that the whole story isn't lyric in a way--but that the end especially... SD: That's exactly right. There's a switch there from the narrative to
the lyric, which is really the preeminent switch in 20th century short story
writing. Frequently what we call an epiphany, what Joyce called an epiphany,
involves that switch. The great epiphany story, and one of the great, truly
masterpieces of 20th century literature, is the story "The Dead." If
you read that story, up to the end, it's almost a story of manners, something
that would come out of Jane Austen. The mode it's written in is really an
almost severe narrative mode, which, during the dinner table speeches, actually
enters the dramatic mode. You sit at the dinner in real time. And then right at
the end of the story there is that astonishing, gorgeous switch to the lyric
mode. And that's how that epiphany works. That's, in fact, how most epiphanies
work. OV: Of
course, in that story and in "Chopin in Winter" you've been prepared
for it the whole way. SD: Yeah, and--I'm talking more about Joyce than myself
here--but that's the difference between a real epiphany and a fake epiphany,
which I guess is kind of like a fake orgasm. It's easy once you understand the
superficial mechanism, to load up on language and go spiraling off somewhere,
but to actually have the rest of the story generate that leap--that's what
makes for a good story. In Joyce's case a great story. OV: So, when you sit
down, you don't think, I'm going to write poetry' or I'm going to write
fiction, you just sort of-- SD: Well, I kind of do. It happens something like point of
view, that is, the single most essential decision a fiction writer makes--point
of view--is almost always an instinctive decision. Most writers I know never
sit down and say, should it be third person, should it be first person, or I'm
in kind of a second-person mood today. My habit is to record things in a
notebook in verse, not poetry, but in verse. Almost everything starts out with
that pattern. Whether it stays that way or not kind of depends what else
happens as I begin working on it. If characters appear and a story starts
asserting itself and I lose control of line, generally that's going to turn
into a piece of fiction, even though I may have spent two or three years trying
to work it into a poem. But that heavily affects the fiction because by that
point, some principle of compression that I associate strongly with poetry has
kind of implanted itself in that piece of writing. As a poem it may have seemed
to lack compression. But oddly, what lacks compression as a poem, sometimes
still has the effect of compression as a piece of fiction. Why that is I'm not
sure. It certainly has something to do with the fact that readers still do have
some different expectations of fiction and poetry even though events in poetry
in the last ten years should be calling that into question. OV: As well
as playing with form, you seem to have a lot of fun with experimenting not for
its own sake, but out of playfulness, l'm thinking of stories where you start
with something fairly outrageous like a virgin saint being frozen for years in
a block of ice, or people going to work on a time machine, and then follow it
with a narrative line in a way that surprising and l2~rces the reader to take
it very seriously. As a reader I feel like--and I may be totally), off on how
the process works--but it feels like the writer has set himself a challenge up
front with the premise and then has a blast rising to the occasion. SD: I certainly like those collisions. They create
interesting problems for you when you're writing, tonal problems, language problems,
so on. You're always looking for a way to challenge yourself as a writer. Of
course, you haven't seen all of the failures where I've challenged myself to a
point that I couldn't come up with answers to the literary problems the poem or
story posed. One of the central examples for me in fiddling around like that
was a film called The Ruling Class. I
loved the effect that movie had, which was that it began as a seemingly zany
British comedy about a bunch of eccentric Brits. In very black humor, a guy is
playing with a noose around his neck and, accidentally, the chair falls and he
ends up hanging himself. For about three-quarters or two-thirds of the movie
it's this kind of farcical black humor. Then there's an extraordinary, what I
would call a bridge, a word I'm borrowing from Bartok, actually. It's one of
the ways he felt he connected his string quartets. It's just this little
hallucinogenic section of the movie. On the other side of that bridge, suddenly
Peter O'Toole becomes Jack the Ripper, and the movie absolutely pulls the
carpet out from under you. Suddenly it's no longer light and comic, it's brutal
and terrifying. I couldn't think of very many other pieces I had seen that did
that. It was one of those things you come out of, saying to yourself, there ~ more to be done there. I want to do
that, I want to fool around with that. OV: It ~ easy
to see the influence of visual and other arts on your work. Some of your
stories actually seem to be after the mechanics and effects of other art forms.
In a story like "Chopin in Winter"--I almost remember that story as a
piece of music, not only because of the lyric mode, but because of its effect
and, also, because it seems in some ways to be structured like a piece of music SD: Well, I started out wanting to play music, and really
lacked the talent to play what I could hear. I mean, there's constantly music
going on in my head. But when I tried to play this stuff, I was never able to
play it the way I heard it. It became so frustrating, I finally turned to
writing, and I was at least more often able to translate what I was hearing or
thinking into a fair facsimile on the page. With music, it would never happen,
but music has remained for me the art I have the deepest attachment to. I don't
even want to know what I spend on CDs in an average year. It's just something
that permeates my life and because of that, it can't help but reflect itself in
my writing. Music is the greatest teacher of our emotions. All the arts teach
our emotions, but music has this way of almost acting like a drug. What I love
about music is the refinement of emotion, the way it will take you to emotions
you don't have language for, and yet you understand them. I think you can do
that--I know you can, I know a lot of writers have--you can do that with
writing as well. That is, even though you're using language, you get to
emotional shadings that we don't exactly have words for. We only can create
constructs of words to get at them, images and stories. There's this lit.
interpretation tendency, which really is very easy to discern in a lot of genre
writing, television and in most American movies, where at the end of a piece,
you are offered a formula. A moral that right triumphs over wrong, or bad guys
must be killed, or that love conquers all. But there's this whole other range
of writing where you could never arrive at notions like that. I think of a
writer like (Italo) Caivino, or a writer like (Yasunari) Kawabata, where you
know that your emotions have been deeply moved, but you'll be damned if you can
explain it in a capsule or a formula of any kind. In fact, you might no more be
able to explain the final vibrations of a Kawabata story than you could explain
the sublimity of a Debussy string quartet or a Monet painting. Somehow the writing
has gotten on that nonverbal level, the effect of the writing--the writing
itself is, of course, a verbal construct--but the verbal construct has taken
you to a nonverbal place that you associate with the other arts. OV: I guess 1
have to ask you about the influence of Chicago as well. Your style is pretty
different from a lot of people you're mentioned alongside--Dreiser, Sandburg,
Nelson Algren. I'm curious to what extent you see yourself as a kind of
literary descendant of theirs--if at all--or what influence they've had on you. SD: Let me put any answer in the context that it seems
enormously kind for anybody to flatter my work by including it in the context
of what is really a wonderful literary tradition of the Chicago style of
writing, whatever the hell that tradition is. When my first book came out I was
very aware that I had organized it around Chicago. I love writing, any writing,
that has a strong sense of place, whether it's Chicago or New York or Calcutta.
And I like writers whose identities are formulated by the places they write
about--Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. Chicago just happens to be my place, it
was given to me, I was born there. But it's really that whole notion of sense
of place, the broader notion, that I respond to. Chicago has a great tradition,
and those writers are important to me because not only were they writing about
a place that interested me, but they were writing about a place I knew about.
So, it was a good way for me to understand the different ways one can write about
a city. The thing that they all have in common, for all their differences, is
that they're realists, which is the style of the realm in the 20th century.
Whatever departure I made was not a conscious decision on my part, at least in
the sense of saying, well everybody else who's written about Chicago has
written about it realistically, I'll try writing about it as a fantasist. But
however these influences are present in the way I've written about the
city--Kafka, Babel, a lot of Eastern Europeans--I'm sure it's a response to the
Eastern European neighborhood I grew up in. I found recognizable elements in
those writers, and they were recognizable because of the Polish-speaking
household I was raised in and so on. So there was that kind of hybridization there,
or stew of different influences, and into that I'll also add American
literature I liked from the 19th century, particularly Hawthorne and Melville
and Poe. American fiction in the 20th century is essentially realism. But
American fiction in the 19th century is not realistic. I didn't see any reason
that we have to have a dividing line. OV: As well as a sense of place, which is
something your books share with Winesburg, Ohio and Dubliners, two other
books they're often mentioned with, they also share a tightness and a link
between stories and a concern with how things work in relation to each other
that you don't .find in a lot of collections that are great but seem like, Here's
what I've been working on for the past ten years. At what point in your writing do you start to recognize how things work
with each other? Are you conscious of writing a book all along or are you
more-- SD: Now I am because I've been through the process a few
times, but at first I wasn't. I really was looking for an organizational
principle the first time, and I found it by accident. The Polish-American Club
asked me to give a talk. I didn't even have a book published, but I'd had some
stories and poems published. They asked me to do something i hate, which was to
title the talk, so the woman who was organizing it would have something to put
in the brochure. I finally came up with the title Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. As soon as I had that title for
the talk, I realized I had a formative title. Once I saw that, I left out a lot
of stories--some set in Italy, others, science fiction stories--I set aside all
the stories that didn't fit that title. Then I laid out what I did have, and on
a purely instinctive level felt how much more I needed to give the feeling of a book. At that point it
occurred to me that I wanted it to be a book, not a collection. The distinction
I would make would be the one you made in your question, that is, are things
interrelated thematically, in terms of' place, imagery, maybe overlapping
characters'? Whatever it is that makes Winesburg,
Ohio and Dubliners and Red Cavalry books was something I
wanted. One of the things I always loved about that format is that you can walk
both sides of the street. If you have a good reader to work with, it gives the reader
all kinds of opportunities to draw lines between the dots and to enjoy doing
that, without having it laid out for him. But it also creates the possibility
for the intensity of a short story over and over and over again. I think the
reason I haven't published a novel is just that I have never been able to
figure out on a personal level how to work with falling action. What's
beautiful about a novel is the rising and falling action. But my temperament is
such that I panic when I hit /'ailing action. I always kind of want rising,
rising, rising action. In a short story, because its more of a sprint than a
distance race, you can accomplish that. The question then becomes, how can I
have that but also have some of the formal complexity of' a lengthier piece?
The answer is to try to create things that are connected, interrelated. OV: It seems
that when it works well, you can have the same kind of cumulative effect, come
away from a book of stories feeling like you’ve ,just read a novel. SD: Dubliners definitely has
that effect on me, and so does Red
Cavalry. And so does In Our Time. I
know Hemingway's reputation is under assault right now, but I think that really
is one of the great works of American literature. OV: 1'11 just finish
by asking you what you're working on now. You have a lot of fans who have been
awaiting a book. SD: It's an extraordinarily frustrating time for me. It goes
back to the question about collections. If
I just published what I have collected, I have a book of poems that would go
over 150 pages, but in essence, they're really three different books of poems,
two of which are very close to being completed. Each one is now well over 50
pages of published work. Neither one has anything to do with the other. I hate
to talk about stuff before it's in a book--it's still drawing castles in the
air--but I have a lot of pages on a novel that I haven't given up on, chapters
of which have been published in things like Chicago
Magazine, Atlantic Monthly. I easily have enough stuff if I just wanted a
collection of stories, but I'm trying to write a book, not a collection. |