What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (17 page)

HM:
Thank you. Anything else?

LT:
You may want it to be the last question.

HM:
Well, you’re opening—it’s not a can of worms, on the contrary—it’s a jewel case full of pearls but there is so much to say about the OuLiPo, especially in connection with Perec, who introduced me to it and through whom I was elected to the group.

LT:
Who started it?

HM:
It was started by Raymond Queneau, who is by now fairly well known in America in translation, and Francois LeLionnais, a great friend of Queneau’s and like him, very interested in mathematics, an extraordinarily versatile and brilliant man. The OuLiPo was created to satisfy their mutual needs—LeLionnais’ case, to form a workshop of experimental literature, in Queneau’s case, to carry him through to the end of this extraordinary book he was writing called
A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
. The book consists of only ten sonnets in which any first line can replace any other first line, any fifth line can replace any other fifth line and so forth which means that it’s 10 to the 14th power, there being 14 lines in a sonnet.

LT:
Because of the permutations.

HM:
The creation of the OuLiPo accompanied his bringing that work to a conclusion. The OuLiPo has had as its purpose the invention and rediscovery of what the French call
contraintes
and we call, for want of a better word, constrictive forms. Rediscovery of forms like the palindrome, the lipogram. The palindrome is something you can read backwards and forwards, the lipogram is writing in which you leave out one or more letters. In both these cases Perec did the most extraordinary work. He wrote a palindrome which is several thousand characters long, in which he describes Perec writing a palindrome—he was a real virtuoso in his language. And he wrote this extraordinary novel called
La Disparition
, “The Disappearance,” but it can’t be translated that way into English because, like the rest of the book, the title excludes any
word that contains the letter “e,” a letter that is even more frequent in French than it is in English. Leaving out the letter “e” would mean that the opening sentence of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past—Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure
would have only two words left. Not only did Perec do this tour de force writing without using the most frequent letter in the language, he also turned this deprivation into the subject of his novel and wrote about it brilliantly and funnily and entertainingly.

LT:
That’s an amazing feat. From what I’ve read about Perec, his life was forged from deprivation, a World War II experience, parents killed in concentration camps, loss of native country. So that absence and lack were central to his existence, and his choosing to write a book that leaves out something essential like the letter “e” parallels his being left without parents and country.

HM:
You got it. Instead of having to deal with this anguishing problem of having had his tongue cut out by history, he deliberately gave up an element which makes writing normally easy, and imposed an extremely harsh rule on himself which he then was able to triumph over. He did it so well that some critics didn’t notice. But they weren’t very attentive critics. Let me add that in the OuLiPo we also invented a great many forms of our own.

LT:
How many people are in the OuLiPo?

HM:
We never exclude our dead members, who include not only Queneau and Perec but Calvino. But without our dead members,
I think, if you counted everyone, we have about 15 or 16, and there are 12 who are active. We meet once a month for dinner.

LT:
In Paris?

HM:
Yes, it’s a working lunch or dinner, and we’d better get the work done before the dinner starts. It gets rather too delirious to get serious business conducted after the meal starts. Why don’t we have lunch?

After Lunch

HM:
I remember earlier in the interview saying that for me rewriting was writing. And I’ve had two experiences in which that was not the case. The first was the title poem sequence of
Armenian Papers
which I wrote at the end of working days right off and hardly corrected at all, and the other was this book which has just come out called
20 Lines A Day
. It’s a collection of my warm-up exercises in which I overcame the terrors that we know of the blank page by giving myself something very short to do: writing at least 20 lines, no less than 20 lines, about anything that happened to come into my head. And the writing turned out to be very interesting even though there was practically no rewriting involved. I just wanted to say that because it’s not what I usually do and it never the less seems to have worked.

LT:
Was doing the 20 lines like automatic writing?

HM:
No, it wasn’t. I only did one set of automatic writing and I discussed it in one of the 20 line pieces. It was like automatic writing only in that I set myself a limited task, but it was quite different in that I had a subject which I stuck to. Or several subjects. But the writing was as they say, “off the top of my head.”

LT:
Certain themes return in your work, one of them, the journey. Which reminds me of Barrett Watten’s designation of you in his essay in the Harry Mathews Number of
The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
“Harry Mathews, having chosen exile . . .” I wondered how you felt about that. You’ve been living in Europe since 1952?

HM:
That’s right.

LT:
How did you see that move then and how do you see it now?

HM:
When I first left America I was very happy to leave the country and what I have to immediately add to that is that I didn’t know the country and I didn’t even know New York City, what I knew was the life of the well-to-do Upper East Side and that life seemed very discouraging to me in terms of what I wanted to do. I was talking to Larry Rivers the other day about that and how, when I went down to what later became my stamping grounds, Greenwich Village, among painters, I felt so out of my element, I felt even worse there than I did among the Upper East Side crowd which was not particularly appealing to me (although of course, there are good friends to be found in all places), so then I went to Europe. It was like a kind of going into exile or might have been
interpreted as that, although what it really felt like was going back to a place which was very familiar and which had been sort of mysteriously familiar. I didn’t come back to the United States at all for six years and then I came back a little bit, I didn’t like it and then I came a little bit more and liked it a little bit more, and of course by then I’d met John Ashbery and through him many other friends here and I was discovering a whole other aspect of New York City and the country. I don’t know America very well, I haven’t traveled it nearly as much as I’d like to, but that original aversion to it vanished. And in any case, even if my departure might have been a kind of expatriation at the beginning, it never amounted to a separation from my identity as an American. I’ve never been anything else, I’ve never thought of myself as being anything else. It always astonishes me when people ask me, “Oh, you live in France, well, do you write in French or are you a French citizen?” First of all, that doesn’t happen all that easily in France, it’s not the way it is here where people come, move here and do become citizens. I may have had a desire to reinvent myself in terms of being, if not a Frenchman, a person living in France, a person living in Italy, a person living in Spain; I very quickly learned that you never leave home. And I think the great advantage of having gone to Europe and having lived there is that it allowed me to become more aware of my American-ness than I would have if I had stayed here.

LT:
How did
Locus Solus
, the magazine that you did with other Americans in Paris, come about?

HM:
Only John Ashbery was in Paris. Jimmy Schuyler and Kenneth Koch were living in New York at the time. And it came about because we, all of us, wanted to be published more. We did this sort of self-centered thing, we published ourselves and our friends. I hadn’t yet found a publisher for
The Conversions
, my first book. I’d published a few poems here and there, John had published his first book, Kenneth had published one or two books, and Jimmy had published, I think, a novel and a book of poems. But we were all anxious to see more of what we wanted, not only in terms of publishing ourselves, but of seeing writing we liked published. Although this is much truer of them than of me. I was much less in touch with what was going on in America than they were because of the fact I’d been living in France, I hadn’t kept up, and I didn’t have the contacts.

LT:
So you didn’t meet Georges Perec until much later?

HM:
Yes. In 1970.

LT: Cigarettes
is dedicated to him, and it felt especially right because of the ending, with its meditation on death.

HM:
A lot of people died in my life, in a very short time. Between 1980 and 1986 both my parents died, Georges Perec died, several other friends died. So as I was writing
Cigarettes
, I had experiences of death which are probably reflected in the book. Historically I dedicated it to Perec because when we met we were both going through fallow periods and then he really climbed out of
his pit and wrote this fantastic book,
Life, A User’s Manual
, which
Cigarettes
didn’t pretend to rival. But the fact that he did it and with such panache and such exuberant diligence, got me out of my reluctance to start a novel again. I was reluctant because of the great difficulty I’d had in publishing
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
. I didn’t want to go through that again. It had been a lot of work and it ended with a lot of disappointment in years of waiting for it to be published. I said, Georges had a lot of excuses not to write if he didn’t want to and he came up with this extraordinary novel, so I should, too.
Cigarettes
has nothing to do with
Life, A User’s Manual
, but his having done the book did inspire me.

LT: Cigarettes
’ last pages are very moving.

HM:
Did I tell you that the pages about the actor in the railroad station (near the end of the last chapter) were the first pages of the book I wrote and the ones that immediately follow—the concluding pages—were the last? There’s the description of this impeccably dressed actor who is hired to be an extra man at social functions, but he’s also an extra like an extra in the movies. I cared about him. I really cared about that passage, with the book ending with that description. Let me just read it.

“In such circumstances, I sometimes think that only the residual strength of the dead beings inside me gives me power to survive at all. By that I mean both the accumulated weight of the generations succeeding one another and, as well, from the first of times when names held their objects fast and light shone among
us in miracles of discovery, the immortal presence of that original and heroic actor who saw that the world had been given him to play in without remorse or fear.”

It’s clearly the original and heroic actor of whom I had no inkling at the time I began the book who provides the unheroic actor in the railroad station.

LT:
This would be a good place to end, at the end of the novel, but I have the alphabet questions I initially planned to ask.

HM:
Ask them all, go ahead.

LT:
“A” for art world. In
Cigarettes
there’s quite a lot about the art world.

HM:
That question could have a very long answer—I was married to Niki de Saint Phalle, and I’ve known artists all my life. I’ve been friends with people in the group on both sides—dealers, editors of art magazines, and so forth. I really have no particular insight or attachment other than that.

LT:
“B,” beauty, there’s an elegance, a beauty to your writing.

HM:
Beauty is something which moves in after the point of works of art have been lost.

LT:
“C,”
Cigarettes
the title. Why that title?

HM:
The question, “Why is the book called
Cigarettes
?” is a question that should be asked.

LT:
“D” is dreams. Do you use them directly?

HM:
Occasionally. I think that Phoebe’s egg hallucination is a dream I had. And the chapter called “The Otiose Creator” in
The Conversions
was a dream of Niki de Saint Phalle.

LT:
“E”—we’ve gone over this—exile.

HM:
Yes, though I’ve never been exiled.

LT:
“F,” fantasy, father, fake, any of those?

HM:
That’s a very interesting grouping you’ve made. More about you than about me, perhaps.

LT:
“G” is games and genius.

HM:
Games yes, genius no.

LT:
You use games, you don’t care about genius?

HM:
No comment, please.

LT:
“H,” horses.

HM:
A very good letter. I don’t want to find out why but—I love horses. I used to love playing them. My second job, when I was 19, was walking hots at Suffolk Downs.

LT:
“I,” insurance, a scam in
Cigarettes
.

HM:
People are very much concerned in
Cigarettes
with keeping control, and that’s got to do with assurance, which is the English name for insurance, and also with taking out insurance, like Allan’s wanting the woman to have an orgasm before he does being “money in the bank.” They’re all into that. To go back to what you said about money, it shows that money isn’t just what happens with the money—it happens in all the other things they do.