Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson

Interview with David Markson ¹²⁴ by Laura Sims

To many readers, even to those of us encountering it almost fifteen years after its publication in 1988, David Markson’s groundbreaking novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress seemed, and still seems, to have come from literature’s future: one that allows for a stripped-down reinvention of character, plot, and narrative while maintaining the emotional intensity and magnetism of the best conventional novels. Markson has refined this alluring combination in the four books that follow Wittgenstein’s Mistress, each one becoming more and more minimal, thus more and more radical, in their use of the traditional elements of fiction. This loosely defined tetralogy (of which each volume can be readily read by itself) consists of: Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and, most recently, and the occasion for this interview, The Last Novel.

In this latest book, one can detect Markson’s singular voice as well as another defining feature of Markson’s work: The Last Novel speaks to its predecessors through a plethora of literary/artistic/athletic/operatic/you-name-it allusions, and through self-reflexive comments on structure, such as: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” This interconnectedness is most noticeable in the last four books, but one can trace the tendency in all of Markson’s books, from the recently re-released early “entertainments,” Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat, to the more seriously literary Springer’s Progress and Going Down.

Although the mainstream literary world has been far too slow in fully appreciating Markson’s work, this May, the American Academy of Arts & Letters honored Markson with an Award for Excellence in Literature. Perhaps it’s a sign that the world is catching up, becoming prepared for Markson’s inventive fiction; we can hope that his readership will markedly increase as he gains more much-deserved attention. In any case, whether the world-at-large is ready or not, Markson will continue to court innovation in the book(s) that will follow The Last Novel. As he explains in the interview, he is determined to reinvent his narrative modus operandi yet again; The Last Novel may mark the end of what has become one of contemporary literature’s most exciting and accomplished series of novels, but it marks a new beginning in Markson’s endlessly pioneering career.

— Laura Sims

Laura Sims: In Vanishing Point, your protagonist speaks about “shuffling and rearranging” his index cards, by way of explaining his method of composition. What does this say about how you yourself go about it, at least in regard to your more recent books? I mean of course those that are crammed with intellectual bits and pieces?

David Markson: It says a great deal, actually. Though in fact my books have always been filled with that sort of material, even if I had to handle it differently, earlier on. Springer, in Springer’s Progress, Kate, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress—they’re both walking repositories of intellectual trivia. But in those instances, the stuff simply fell as it occurred to them, meaning where it was called for in the narrative. But in these last four volumes — where that material is the books — the approach had to be new. All my life I’ve been an inveterate checker-off-in-margins, but in recent years, writing Reader’s Block and the rest, I simply began to copy out the stuff that interested me instead. And where better than on three-by-five cards?

LS: But doesn’t that become unwieldy? After all, there must be thousands for each book, finally.

DM: Do I describe this or don’t I, I can’t remember? I file them one behind the other, in the tops of shoe boxes, ultimately two of those taped end to end. So it comes to about two feet per book, I’d guess. But even as the stacks are expanding, I’m shuffling and rearranging repeatedly, as you quoted a minute ago.

LS: Be more specific.

DM: Oh, well — an item about Dante, let’s say. If that one seems to go relatively near the front here, then where does this other Dante go? Oh, but now wait, this Guido Cavalcanti on the same theme, which of the two do I connect that one with? And before or after? And how nearby, so the connection might be spotted? Et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, because of the numbers alone, it’s far more complicated than that. And on top of which, this is going on for a couple of years also, starting with the lonely very first few cards, and then with each additional one being dropped into one tentative spot or another as I keep on adding.

LS: But even at the end, surely a lot of it still has to be somewhat random?

DM: Of course. There are hundreds of things that I find intrinsically interesting, or that echo different themes, but which have to simply fall where they may. Nonetheless, as I said, those other placements are all generally much more intricate and interconnected than I’ve indicated, and often pretty subtle. I’m also aware that a fairly high percentage of my readers are conscious of very little of it all.

LS: But good readers are?

DM: Naturally, sure. In fact, an amusing story. Even before he finished the first of them, Kurt Vonnegut called me. “David, what sort of computer did you use to juggle all that stuff?” I had to tell him I didn’t own one — I still don’t, incidentally — and that it all came out of my aging and rapidly deteriorating brain. Plus of course those ubiquitous index cards.

LS: Why are you suddenly laughing?

DM: More to the same story, actually. That first of the series, Reader’s Block, is the one in which I mention all those suicides, everybody from Empedocles to Sappho to Hart Crane to Sylvia Plath, there must be a hundred and fifty of them scattered through. Well, and of course also my central figure, Reader himself, at the conclusion. So in any case Kurt called me back a little later, when he’d actually finished. This time it was, “David, I worry about your mental condition.”

LS: Presumably you reassured him?

DM: I’m still extant.

LS: But sadly as of recently he isn’t, alas. Meanwhile—

DM: Wait. Listen. Under the circumstances, would another Vonnegut recollection or two be out of place here?

LS: Of course not. Do, yes.

DM: Both anecdotes that come to mind involve me anyhow. The first goes back to when I was trying to find a publisher for Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Or rather when my agent was. Elaine, my ex-wife.

LS: And you had fifty-four rejections. For the work most people consider your most important. It’s still beyond belief.

DM: The most dismal part of it wasn’t the number of turn-downs, but rather the reasoning behind them. Editors who truly admired the thing, but then announced that it was too intellectual or too offbeat for most readers to handle. Or worse, places where the editor was, in fact, willing to take a chance, but then the sales clucks vetoed it. Trust me, it got to be pretty draining, after a while. This was back in the mid-1980s, by the way. And in any case, somewhere back along in there, there was this major international PEN conference here in New York, writers from all over the world. In recent years I’ve pretty much ceased to be a PEN member, but at that time I went uptown to sit in on some of the sessions. And at one juncture I was wandering down a corridor in the hotel — I forget which hotel it was — and out of the corner of my eye I spotted Kurt, backed against a sort of cul-de-sac wall, and literally surrounded by admirers — at least twenty or more. You know, probably younger writers from everywhere to hell and gone, getting a chance to exchange a word or two with someone they had previously only been able to admire from a distance. Anyhow, I just kept on walking. But then after half a minute, no more, Kurt caught up to me and led me on down the hall — urgently, almost. I don’t know what sort of excuse he’d made, to bolt that way. And what did he want? As soon as he found us a quiet alcove—“David, tell me what’s happening with that manuscript?” I didn’t even remember having spoken to him about the problems. But there he was, that concerned. Now maybe he’d been famous for long enough so that basking in all that adulation was something he could easily wave aside — but still, I found it extraordinary. Who the hell was I? Practically nobody at that entire convention had ever heard my name, at that juncture. But this was Kurt, who he was.

LS: All of us should have friends like that.

DM: But that’s part of the point there too. He and I weren’t even ever that close, though it would turn out that I’d see a good deal more of him in subsequent years. He was always that way. That second incident I had in mind was only three years ago or so. He was doing a gig at that enormous Barnes and Noble in Union Square. And the place was just mobbed, I mean to the extent that they’d actually had to lock the front doors some hours before it started. I was sitting a little behind and to the side of him, with a couple of others, waiting to go to dinner afterward, and I had a classic view of the kids lined up to get books signed, and it was utterly astonishing. They were being rushed through by the security people, guards snatching their books and slapping them down for Kurt to autograph, no conversation permitted, no requesting please make it “For Evelyn,” just snatch, slap, accept it back, and down the nearby escalator you go. But I kept gauging their faces. As I said, again relatively young people, most of them. And it wasn’t the predictable look of excitement or admiration you’d see with virtually any other famous author, or even awe, but I swear, there was something almost religious-seeming in it. Is that a ridiculous exaggeration? The more reasonable word I’m looking for is “devotion,” maybe. Which probably comes closest to what they felt for him. At any rate, this had been going on for an eternity, and with Kurt eventually in a state of near exhaustion, when a voice came wafting back up from the escalator well, one of the women who’d been shunted down by security: “God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut!” It was unimaginably moving. Not just the sentiment, but the allusion to that title of Kurt’s also. Then a while later, when we ourselves were finally leaving — in our case, via an elevator — I asked Kurt if he’d heard it. And when he said he hadn’t, and I started to tell him about it, he immediately cut me off. “Wait, listen, that reminds me—“ and he commenced to tell me about something kind he’d heard someone say about one of my books. How do you match that? Believe me, there may have been better writers in his time than Kurt — well, we know there were — but surely there couldn’t have been many more generous human beings.

LS: I’ll indicate a short pause here, in the transcript. But let me praise Markson for a moment, too. Why are you so good at portraying women? Not just the two in Going Down, or all three in Springer—his wife, the one he has the affair with, the old girlfriend who dies — and not even just Kate, whose monologue comprises the sum total of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I noticed it even when rereading your so-called “entertainments” recently, more than one in each book.

DM: Thank you. You’re sweet too.

LS: Come on, an answer.

DM: I don’t have one. I’m pretty sure I was asked that in an interview once before. And all I could say was, could it be because I simply like women? Which would mean, I guess, that I pay attention to them. But the gal in my life at the present moment would probably burst out laughing at the notion. She’s convinced I no longer pay attention to much of anything.

LS: Don’t you? Because that brings me to another question I’d had in mind. You’ve been quoted as saying you no longer read fiction. Is that still true? And if so, why?

DM: Still, yes. To a great extent. And here again, no answer. Undeniably, some of the most memorable aesthetic experiences in my life have had to do with novels. To make a bad joke, I’m not even sure I ever responded to a woman at the same depths to which I responded to Ulysses or to Under the Volcano. Or The Possessed. But somehow in recent years they just stopped evoking that older sort of resonance for me. Is it age? Is it possible to have simply read too damned many of the things? And a more subtle question here, that equally troubles me. What has my inability to read novels had to do with the way I myself have been writing over that same period, these books in which I leave out so much of the traditional stuff of fiction — plot, background, incident, description, whatever? Again, I’m a blank.

LS: Not to mention you’re forgetting an even more critical dimension that you’ve eliminated.

DM: Meaning?

LS: Meaning character. Wait, here, let me quote. In Vanishing Point, you say that you’re experimenting — or your protagonist, Author, is doing so—“to see how little of his own presence he can get away with throughout.” Why does Author want to remove as much of himself as possible from the book? Or why do Reader, and Writer, and Novelist, in the other volumes?

DM: But isn’t the answer in the question itself there, in just the way it’s written? Experimenting to see how little of himself “he can get away with”? Or put the emphasis on the word “experimenting.” Look, when I wrote Reader’s Block, the passages about Reader — well, about Reader and/or the character he calls Protagonist, who he’s thinking of writing about, but who’s obviously an alter ego — that stuff takes up only approximately twenty percent of the book. And the other eighty percent is composed of those intellectual odds and ends we’ve spoken about, the material from the index cards. That itself was obviously an experiment. But then, exactly as I phrased it — to see what I could get away with — in each of the next three books I held down the references to my central figures to no more than one-and-a-half percent. Honestly, that little. Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends. But so then what’s the ultimate experiment, the thrust of it all? To see if, in spite of that, I can still manage to make Writer and Author and Novelist nonetheless actually exist, for whoever’s reading me. And apparently they do — the experiment works. Apparently I not only manage to convey a sense of character in each case, but even some dramatic impact at the end as well. And this, again, in spite of there being only that meager one-and-a-half percent that deals with them directly.

LS: So obviously the index-card material plays its own crucial role also.

DM: Obviously. And not just in the way it’s shuffled and rearranged, as we said earlier. That’s often just craft anyway, a question of aesthetic balance. Of getting the parts to interrelate, what I label at least once in each book as “interconnective syntax.” Or call it poetic structure, despite the fictional length. But what matters even more is the choice of materials. When I’m collecting that stuff, I usually copy out six or eight or ten items for every one I eventually keep. Most of which have to deal with age, death, idiotic reviews, impoverishment, whatnot. It’s that which affects that sense of the “portrait” that unfolds — matters that he himself would be preoccupied with.

LS: Death particularly, indeed. Not just the suicides in Reader, but then how people die, where people die, most recently when they die. Though with overlapping between books also. Why that central preoccupation?

DM: Hey, Sims, I’m a hundred and nine years old. Can we skip that subject, maybe?

LS: Okay. How about this instead? How does religion fit into your life? Or the work?

DM: Not the most appetizing alternative. I mean since it doesn’t, not in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. Yes, there are any number of references to it in the books, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that every single one of them is negative. Or cynical. Or even vehement, about all the bigotry and hatred and misery and disaster it promulgates — wherever, whenever, any form of it. No, there’s no connection with my work at all, certainly no religious impulse behind it.

LS: Another jump, then. A quote from This Is Not a Novel: “Photography is not an art.” A pretty damning dismissal. And what about film? Does either medium influence you at all?

DM: I’ve had this argument before. Goodly souls lecturing me about composition, about lighting, all the rest. But in what way does a photograph ever reconceive reality like a Cézanne, say? Or a Matisse? And how can you look at the brush strokes in a van Gogh, or in a Rembrandt — let alone experience the illusion of light bursting out of the pigments in those same very two — and then think of chemically reproduced images on treated paper as genuine art?

LS: Minor art, at least?

DM: Okay, I surrender. But as for film, there again I’ve never been a buff. And again, it takes a pretty lax definition to use the word art here also. Too many cooks. Romanticism, thy name may be David, but for me art is one poor disaffected wretch all by himself ripping up sheet after sheet in his garret and silently screaming because he can’t find that elusive single right word.

Or it’s Michelangelo, flat on his back on that scaffolding, month after month, and now and then dropping heavy planks if he suspects the Pope is down below peeping. I’m borrowing from my latest book there, incidentally. But no, I believe no influence from film at all.

LS: Tell me about the internet. Or did we already half answer this, when you said you don’t use a computer?

DM: A good deal of what I know about it makes me want to tear my hair. There seems to be no editorial responsibility out there whatever. And no authority, to evaluate things. I don’t mean those damned-fool reviews that every dimwit and his cousin Hiram can type in, but even drivel from the so-called Web magazines. Good grief, someone wrote an essay on my work, some few years ago, which I happened to see — a long essay — and the simp couldn’t even get the chronology of my life correct, which is readily available. But far more egregious, the piece was patently dishonest. He raised some question or other about what he felt was a major failing of mine, and only at the end did I realize he’d done so without saying two words about one of my most central books, and one which knocked his theory into a cocked hat. Meaning he hadn’t even read it. No print editor would have let him get away with that, but here nobody gave a damn. No, I more than realize the conveniences I’m missing, with no e-mail and the rest, but I suspect I’m enduring very little loss in literary terms by going without.

LS: Those two old “entertainments,” as you call them—Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat—they were recently reissued by Shoemaker & Hoard. Do you really feel that they are mere “entertainments,” or do they rise above that self-deprecating title?

DM: Oh, I guess they hold up for what they are, but no, what they “are” are still crime novels, no more. Listen, way back after I did the second one, my agent at the time said the publisher wanted to give me a contract for a series, two a year continually, with the same detective, and even though I was still not getting much serious work done, I dismissed the idea without a second thought. But as I say, I don’t disavow the things — in fact I got a kick out of rereading them, after forty-five years — but that’s it.

LS: Is there any talk about your satirical Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee being re-released?

DM: That would be something else. And after almost the same length of time I’m still pretty proud of that one. I’ve always felt it’s well put together. And everybody found it hilarious — serious-funny, so to say. But then that cretinous Frank Sinatra film sent it eternally down the drain.

LS: Though perhaps with the film so long forgotten someone might take a new look?

DM: Don’t transcribe that. People will suspect I asked you to dangle it out there.

LS: All right, another change of subject. Your latest is called The Last Novel. Naturally, any number of us hope it isn’t that. What’s next?

DM: Come hell or high water, it will be different from these last four — the index-card four, as we seem to be calling them. I actually threw in a reference to the word “tetralogy” in this last one, but in all truth I’d never initially intended that. After Reader’s Block, I simply found myself addicted to collecting that stuff. I’d even heaped up those cards with each of the next three before I ever had any definite sense of what I’d do with them — like half molding the flesh before I’d contrived the skeleton to hang it on. But after this last one I forced myself, categorically, to quit. I can stumble onto the most seductive anecdote or quotation in the world, one which normally would have been a spectacular thematic fit for me, and I grit my teeth and ignore it.

LS: Okay, so no index-card material.

DM: Actually, the basic form will probably be somewhat the same, still “experimental” in that way. Short takes as opposed to lengthy narrative, no fictional baggage, no dramatic scenes, no episodes, and many of what we’ve been calling odds and ends coming from an actual relationship itself. But it’s all extremely tentative in my head still.

LS: But you used the word “relationship.” You mean a novel about people, plural, instead of merely the isolated single individuals you’ve been dealing with? And not just in these four titles, but as long ago as in Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well?

DM: Yes. A man and a woman. A guy and a gal. Him, her. Them.

LS: I’m noticing that twinkle in your eye. You’re not by any chance talking about a love story?

DM: Who? Didn’t I tell you I’m a hundred and nine years old?

LS: You’re only seventy-nine.

DM: And devious, too. When else would you be tricked into calling someone “only” seventy-nine, except after he’d said he was that much older?

LS: I’m not forgetting that you also just now referred to a woman in your life. Which reminds me that I’d been intending to ask you about your reputation as an archetypal sort of recluse. May I presume you’re no longer quite that?

DM: She lives in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. It’s forty minutes, from here in Greenwich Village.

LS: Not a bad commute, especially considering the journey’s end. Do you read on the subway? Or just stare into space, lovesick?

DM: Can you indicate at this point that I just smacked you upside the head? Ask me something absolutely unrelated, you hear?

LS: Maybe not wholly unrelated. Since you want to smack somebody, tell me if you ever had a fistfight.

DM: Good lord. Though as a matter of fact, yes. Once. When I was about thirteen. For what seemed like practically an hour. Back and forth across front lawns, in and out of driveways, between parked cars — neither one of us willing to quit. This being back in Albany, where I grew up. Finally a couple of the older kids who’d been egging us on called it a draw. But what I’d not been aware of, and nobody’d said a word about, was that the other boy was wearing a ring. My face wound up looking as if I’d fallen under the proverbial lawn mower. I was reluctant to go to school for days.

LS: What is that new look of delight, suddenly?

DM: I only this instant realize. Ask me an irrelevant question and it turns out to have a literary connection after all. The very kid I fought with is quoted in my latest book.

LS: You’re not serious?

DM: Fact. We went on through high school together, and after that I think I saw him no more than two or three times, and not since around the Kennedy years. But lately he’s phoned me now and then. And somehow he stumbled onto one of the books, maybe Vanishing Point. How, I’ve no idea, since he turns out to be unquestionably not a reader. But he called me about it.

LS: And?

DM: I quote him without any sort of attribution, just the few words, in an isolated paragraph. He doesn’t even quite sense what he’s saying, or certainly not who he’s saying it to, meaning the author, but it’s extraordinarily appropriate to all the other typical dunderheaded critical put-downs of everybody that I make use of all the way through. The passage that says, “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?”

LS: Oh god — what did you tell him?

DM: What could I say? Something like, “Yes, that’s all there is, those little things.”

LS: David, there’s more. Believe me, there’s rather more.

DM: Hey, I know. But thank you.

124 This interview appeared in Rain Taxi, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2007.