Fox: With A Servant’s Tale I had to do a lot of research on sugar cane. It’s always hard for me to research and then amalgamate. With The Slave Dancer too. I think everything is autobiographical, even science fiction. Planet Ork. You experience something in your mind, your brain, your soul, whatever it is. All my stuff tends to be rooted in my own life, but transformed in some way I don’t understand yet, as old as I am. And so many people have talked about writing and fiction and whatnot. A biography is being written about me in German. I’ve never been a big hit here. I did go through three years of turndowns for A Servant’s Tale and The Widow’s Children, which my editor Jovanovich said was my best book, but my track record was poor, I didn’t sell books here.
One day I gave my students at the University of Pennsylvania, where I taught for seven semesters, an assignment. I said write about what’s happening in the next room. And not one of them said, huh? But then they tried. And my thought recently has been—and it’s being put in the biography—I can’t write about what’s going on in the next room, fiction. I can only write what’s going on in this room, reality. It’s a good way of defining the difference. I can’t really do the other anymore, along with smoking I’ve lost the invention capacity also. Of course one invents with reality also—if you write about what’s happening in the room you’re in, it’s a kind of invention. But it’s not like the other way. A writer named Lynne Tillman made a recording of me reading a large paragraph in Poor George and I was so struck by the way I missed being able to do that. It was a paragraph about a dog swimming out to a boat. It strokes and gets into the boat and greets its owner. I wished I could do that, but I got over the mourning. I had such an acute sense of the loss of that.
Rumpus: In Desperate Characters the Bentwood marriage is very rocky, they’re constantly trading barbs. At one point they are talking about America and Otto asks Sophie if she hates her country and she replies, “I hate you.” Then he says, “A lot?” “No,” she says. Where does dialogue like this come from?
Fox: I don’t know. Probably from conversations I’ve picked up here and there, I used always be listening to people. I know the feelings that go behind that dialogue somehow. Life is very difficult for all of us, for some of us it’s terrible. It’s very hard to explain where dialogue comes from, literally. It’s very hard to explain literally why the sorcerer turned the tree into a dog. It’s so difficult to understand volition and wish and where these things come from. Do you hate me a lot? No, a little. It’s hard to explain. It’s easy to talk about but not to explain, there’s a difference between the two. I love Proust and Stendhal and all the French writers and Dickens and I love Richard Ford too. Rock Springs. As I read I never think to question that way, because I don’t have an analytical mind. I take in things and am able to put them out in another form—I used to be able to. It is very hard for me to analyze procedures.
Rumpus: In the beginning of the third chapter, when they are going home after the party, Otto says, “I’m tired of parties. Movie talk bores me. I don’t care about Fred Astaire and he doesn’t care about me. I care even less about Fellini.” Now to me this is hilarious and sad. It’s bitterness, but it’s funny and destructive at the same time. It’s entertaining, but you still paint the portrait of this man so realistically that though he is repellent, people identify with him. I identify.
Fox: He has a certain kind of intelligence. He cuts off all islands of sensation and understanding with a kind of authoritative ax, so to speak. It’s a kind of impatience that he has and it’s central to his character. But then Sophie, when she finds the underlining (in one of Otto’s books), Boys of fourteen were hung. She wonders if maybe there is more to him than she thought. She’s very struck by certain qualities about him—intolerance and bias and stiff nakedness and not yielding to the moment. But then she finds that line underlined in that book, Boys of fourteen were hung, and she wonders about him. There’s always that when we live with other people, if you’re open to finding out things. And once in a while, we’re all open in a certain way. Then you usually do find things about them that are very surprising. Even people we’ve known for twenty-five, thirty years.
Rumpus: But then I was rereading that sex scene where he just decides he’s going to have sex with her and does.
