Writer Larry Woiwode, in an exclusive interview for THE WORLD & I with Harold Fickett and Gregory Wolfe, discusses his hopes and concerns.
Q. Writers have seen themselves as craftsmen, magicians, professional liars, unacknowledged legislators, prophets, and media stars. How do you see the writer?
A. As a writer--one who puts together words in a certain way in order to make sense. I'm sure that Shakespeare, who knew his history fairly well, was well versed in human nature, and turned out plays like any good journeyman, would have been appalled to be asked the questions writers today are asked. Or embarrassed. Writers aren't shamans, and the political statements of most of them seem the same empty liberal pieties we've been hearing for twenty years, as if they were issued to writers by some central organization like PEN. In the earlier generation Mailer and Updike were at least original, and often amusing.
Q. Recognition came to you fairly early in life with What I'm Going to Do, I Think, which won the William Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year. How old were you then? Did the early recognition present any problems for you?
A. I was twenty-seven when the novel came out. It got some good attention and was a best-seller, as I recall, for a while. For four years before that, I had been publishing stories regularly in the New Yorker, so it wasn't as if I rose out of nowhere. But I suspect that the attention my first novel received put pressure on the next, Beyond the Bedroom Wall. I had also become a father, and one always has to sort the balance between family and writing. I was about to let Bedroom Wall go in 1971, two years after the first, but then spent almost four further years working on it. It was rough going at times, yes, although I wasn't often really frozen or devastated, and it turned out to be a big book, so it kept me busy.
Q. You are an accomplished poet as well as fiction writer. We pay so little attention to poets these days. Why is that?
A. I wanted to be a poet, but also wanted to make a living at writing. Was it the advent of interviews, when poets were treated as gurus, that seemed to work impatience in them at writing poems? I've observed this impatience in younger writers, who want to first set the world on its ear and then declaim to its underlings, as it were. Good poetry demands good readers, and it seems that television has set so many people down in a stupor that there are few readers left.
Q. Much of modern and contemporary fiction concentrates on psychological disintegration. In Poppa John, the main character, Ned, goes through a psychic unraveling and so does the narrator of Born Brothers, Charles. Why do you think times of acute mental crisis are so important to our culture?
A. Moments of mental crisis are important to the individual, I think not the culture, although I would hope that individuals in some cultures might learn from the crises my characters might dramatize. Walker Percy says somewhere that in the best fictional characters, the potential for hope and catastrophe has become accelerated and there certainly is something to that. That's why writers focus on such moments, I
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