Fox: He imposes it on her and then he says, “I got her that time.” There’s a certain triumph in it that’s not about sex, it’s about domination. Not male, human domination. And it’s satisfying in a certain way, beyond sex. It’s emotionally satisfying, psychological, whatever. And it just came to me, but it must have a reason for being. I don’t inquire too closely about the reasons. But I don’t enquire why I do certain things.
In the case of The God of Nightmares, that’s very close to life, those two people I wrote about. There was a couple I knew in New Orleans and the people in the book are based on them. And they were lovely, wonderful people. Not entirely lovely, because they were humans—we all sin and have to forgive each other, or not. And they were both writers. He had been working in a plant in Biloxi and Sherwood Anderson came through. And Sherwood said to him, You ought to be a writer, and he was forty then. So he moved right to the French Quarter. Pat O’Donnell, who wrote Green Margins and won a Houghton-Mifflin prize. But I stayed with them in a little bedroom, like the Van Gogh bedroom. And literally the floor boards were wide enough for us to talk while they cooked in the kitchen. An old slave quarters. I had to write about them. I loved them so, they were so good to me. They’re both dead now.
Rumpus: Are men difficult to write for you or it doesn’t matter?
Fox: No, it’s not a matter of difficulty or ease. Thinking of children—I would never read Anna Karenina to a child. Not because of the sexual element, because they don’t have judgment. You don’t get judgment till you’re past 25 or 20. And then it’s very slight. Judgment is a function of time. It would bore most children to hear it, unless they were interested in Anna throwing herself beneath the train. They might be. So whenever I sat down I knew whether it was going to be a children’s book or an adult novel.
Rumpus: The Vietnam War had already started when you wrote Desperate Characters and there are some references to it. It seems to be the cloud in the background that has people on edge. Did you know how you wanted to contain it when you started writing the book?
Fox: I felt the kind of desperation that everyone in the book feels in one way or another. You know they see that sign when they are driving out to Long Island. I mean it was somebody who was the usual kind of political brute. Speaking from a post board, calling to his own people. It’s full of that kind of alarm. There’s a lot we don’t know about what makes us do various things. Whether being a cobbler, a violinist, a writer, a veterinarian. There’s a lot we don’t understand about it. I’m very respectful of the ignorance of human beings. I respect our ignorance more than our intelligence. It’s very interesting how we get into these things.
Jonathan Franzen, who was so instrumental in saving the book—he found it at Yaddo. I had gone down to where he was teaching. He’d found one copy at Yaddo, but no more anywhere else. So I called my daughter in Oregon and she found eleven copies at Powell’s and she sent them to Jonathan. Then I went down and we met. He was divorcing his wife and was very agitated about it. So I listened to him and he listened to me and we became friends. He moved to New York and we’d see him a bit more than we have in the last few years. But he was terribly interested in that book. When my editor, Tom Bissell, who’s a writer himself, read the article in Harper’s (“Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels,” Franzen’s article in the April 1996 Harper’s where he speak of Desperate Characters) he wrote to Jonathan who he didn’t know and asked him my address. Jonathan sent it to him and Tom got in touch with me and the same day he contacted me I sent him the last copy I had of Desperate Characters. Tom was at W.W. Norton then. They republished all my books.
Rumpus: He couldn’t even find a copy?
Fox: No. David Godine reprinted it twice after Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich published it in 1970 and then it went out of print completely. In fact all my books have—because of my track record, I’m not a great runner.
Rumpus: Well, some people don’t like to hear your style of reality, but I do and people I know do.
Fox: It’s mysterious, isn’t it? That kind of national propensity. In German and France and Italy where I’m more published, it’s a different story.
Rumpus: In The Western Coast you expanded into a large cast of characters. Annie meets around twenty-five or so distinct people in her travels. They are party scenes with many people speaking at once. And this kind of informs the scenes in The Widow’s Children with all those consciousnesses showing themselves at the same time, especially in the dinner scene.
