 |
|
|
|
|
A Conversation with JONATHAN RAYMOND: Author of "The Half-Life," A Novel
by INDEPENDENT STAFF
June 2004
LAST SUMMER Portland, Ore.'s Organ Review of Arts published an essay by Jonathan Raymond, which suggested that an increasingly homogenous global culture had intensified the need for a new regionalist literature, a fiction that highlighted provincial identities and quirks rather than attempting to flatten them with stories that attempted to be universal: “The political, emotional and financial truths of our families and friends bear witness to the lies that power would tell us.” We might read this as a call to return to the raking of muck and tugging of heartstrings, in the tradition of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck's sympathetic accounts of industrialization's noble and suffering victims. But Portland, where Raymond spent most of his childhood, is no Chicago, no Dust Bowl. Its struggles are less about heroes and villains than pioneers attempting to tame the land itself, and to forge a local identity out of a place too young to have anything but a natural history.
This is the regionalism of Raymond's first novel, The Half-Life, a book that views history as a set of relationships born, developed, and finally forgotten in a single place. The book alternates between the parallel accounts of two 1830s frontiersmen, Cookie and Henry, who follow a speculative beaver-oil scheme to China and back, and two 1980s teenagers, Tina and Trixie, who grow marijuana in the woods to finance their first collaborative film project. Despite living 150 years apart, unknown to one another, the doubled pairs are united by the evidence the older ones leave behind—a pair of old skeletons and a scroll. Both friendships begin with the circumstantial scarcities of place. In the 1830s, a lack of food; in the 1980s, a lack of distractions amid the dullness of television and the girls' tiresome hippie parents. The friendships start with these shared needs, blossom into mutual quests and explorations, then gradually lose their symmetry. They decay into memories and then bodies, ending as they began, with place.
Raymond is 32 years old, teaches fiction at the New School, and edits Tin House, a quarterly literary journal. He contributed a short story about David Lee Roth entitled “Wow,” to THE INDEPENDENT'S first issue. This interview took place in a park near his apartment in Brooklyn, a place, he said, he'll never know as well as his hometown, no matter how long he lives there.
THE PHILADELPHIA INDEPENDENT : If this novel were a doghouse, how would you say that you decided to go and build it?
Jonathan Raymond : Building a doghouse has been a long-held dream of mine, one dream among many. Then there came a point when some of the other long-held dreams became very farfetched. I realized that rather than building a bunch of little doghouses all over the yard, I needed to concentrate my energies on one really big doghouse with all the fixings on it. I decided not to wait around any more to write a novel. I'm going to quit doing little video installations and little paintings in my basement, and little reviews for every little zine that comes along, and just actually see what happens when I focus all my attention on one big project. Now, four years later, I have this doghouse that I can go lie down in.
TPI : It's a nice doghouse.
JR : Yeah, it's a pretty plush doghouse. It's like one of those Snoopy doghouses with the huge underground basement, with a pool table.
TPI : Most first novels seem to draw directly from the writer's own life and have a clear author/narrator/protagonist. Why didn't you go this route?
JR : Not that many interesting things have ever happened to me, so I had to be a little more imaginative about it. It puzzles me how most people feel so beholden to the facts of their own lives, when you can throw those facts into a different system and come up with something else. If my life were as interesting as the book, maybe I wouldn't want to be writing stuff anyway. If I were into extreme sports, I could just go do that.
TPI : Many of your earlier short stories have contemporary settings. Much of this book takes place in the 19th century, including scenes on a ship and in China. How did you go about researching this stuff?
JR : The research was pretty thin, honestly. If one scratches very hard they will find that it's pretty flimsy. To me, the more important thing was creating an ambience of authentic history happening. It's more like movie history than history with a capital ‘h.' I was interested in that patina of history and the plasticity that happens when you're not totally confined to historical accuracy. My hope is that the scenes on the boat and the scenes from China will seem fully fleshed, even though there's a certain slight of hand going on. The sense of historical truth or accuracy is being held together with some smoke and mirrors, which is fine. My own understanding of history comes from pretty minimal coordinates. I have certain vague ideas about how things happen and for me part of this was going deep into my own half-fictive ideas about what different historical periods were like and trying to mine them through my imagination rather than through strict events, if that makes sense. That's another question I'm going to have to learn how to answer in a real way, because friends of mine are pointing out historical inaccuracies throughout the writing of it. They're piling up already, these huge historical inaccuracies throughout, but to me, it's not that big of a deal, because it's not ultimately about capturing the truth. Or there's a different kind of truth that it's working, one that's more emotional and vague.
TPI : It seems like a lot of your characters also struggle with research and historical interpretation. Things disappear and then reappear, but those who find them never seem to be able to track down the origins.
JR : There was a funny article in the New York Times a year or so ago about a time capsule in Washington Park in Portland. They had buried the capsule 100 years ago, but various landmarks and monuments had been moved over the years, and they couldn't find the time capsule 100 years later. Stuff just gets shuffled around. It may one day pop up, belatedly. That's just how time works. It's either too early or too late.
TPI : So are these confusions a function of the landscape?
JR : That was something I was conscious of going in, the landscape-y stuff. I wanted the landscape to be a character in the book, in the same way landscape was a character for 20th century regionalist writers—people like Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis or Willa Cather, or like William Faulkner and the Southern agrarians. I think certain conversations about globalism and the postmodern economy have caused people to forget, or at least forget to appreciate, the power of specific places. I wanted local knowledge to define and frame the storyline. I was concerned with making it very specifically Northwest-y and not making it about media culture or how everywhere it's the same. I'm more concerned with how everything's different, and how the mysteries moving through certain landscapes are highly contained and local. American history in the Northwest, for example, has more of a relationship to China than it does to Europe. That's one thing I love about the cover, it's an image of the Columbia River gorge but it could just as easily be a picture of China.
TPI : We've been talking a lot about content. I would be remiss if I didn't also ask you about process, the place you write, the equipment you use, the graph where you tally up the number of hours and pages. Do you have any tricks?
JR : Yeah, I have to put on my magic writing underwear, something like that, that I keep in my lead-lined box. That, and I lie down in my Orgone machine every morning.
TPI : Your what?
JR : My Orgone machine, you know? It's some kind of proto-New Age sort of pseudoscientific thing to get your biorhythms activated and your mojo going in a certain way. Wilhelm Reich, I think, invented the Orgone machine. A lot of the beatniks and the Esalen people were into it. So anyway, process. I honestly don't understand how anyone wrote before word processing and the ability to cut and paste. I don't know how you could do it. For one, there's just the issue of creating the time to do it, and actually sitting down every day for a while, and not getting frustrated even if something's not purely working. Part of me thinks that if anyone sits down in a room with the intention of writing a novel, eventually they will have written one. It's purely a function of time. If you spend enough time doing it, eventually you'll have something. That's the primary thing. The other thing, for me, is manufacturing allegories for writing. There's this constant sidebar effect, coming up with new kinds of metaphors for what it is that you're doing. Like today it feels like I'm digging a huge pit with a circular stairway that I have to go down and get a pile of dirt, and then I have to walk all the way up the stairs and throw it out, and then I walk back down. Or today I feel like I'm building a barrel from the inside. Or today I feel like a shark. I just have to keep moving all the time and as long as I keep moving I won't die. Or today I'm kind of like a monkey, and I'm going from vine to vine and I just have to trust there's going to be a vine when I get there. Sometimes it gets ridiculous, like I'm half-monkey, half-shark. As long as I keep moving from vine to vine everything's going to be fine.
TPI : Did you start from scratch or do you have a framework or outline in mind?
JR : There's a kind of back and forth between the notes and the manuscript. One thing that it's important for any writer to have is a little notebook, so you can jot down your ideas when they come to you. A lot of time writing is spent actually at the computer, but a lot of it is walking around with it in the back of your head and letting it sift around in a certain way. Often, you'll have a real breakthrough riding the subway or taking a job or watching a movie instead of staring at a blank piece of paper. It's important to come to the keyboard fortified with the ideas you've had, because to sit down with no real idea is a recipe for total despair. It's important to always be thinking about it in some way, even if it's in a very marginal way. Often that's where the best stuff comes from, when you're kind of relaxed and not putting too much pressure on it. So I have notebooks that I jot stuff down in. When I start to get scared about losing the book, that's when I know it's time to go type this into the computer and make sure I have it somewhere else too. But then there's other times it goes straight into the computer. Once I have a big enough mass of material to be working with, then it's just a matter of putting daily pressure on it and shaping and changing and making it readable. That's one level, getting it down, and then there's another level, the revising. There are constantly hairline fractures appearing in what you're working on, where you realized this avenue isn't working and need to try something else. I see that down the road there's a warp that's happening that I need to make sure doesn't turn into a huge crack. And sometimes things do crack off and you can't save it any more and you just have to discard. It's a really weird process, because the thing you're working on is changing the whole time that you're working on it. It's a lot of shuttling back and forth between fixing and making new material that starts to happen. One has to kind of have the blind confidence that it will eventually harden into a final shape and be done, and to learn to enjoy the process of being engaged in this morass, because if you didn't enjoy it, it would be totally intolerable.
TPI : What was it like growing up in Portland?
JR : I was in high school and only just beginning to explore. There were these really arty kinds of punk rock bands, bands like the Hellcows or Hitting Birds or the Obituaries. Bands that nobody's heard of who wasn't there, but bands that to me, in high school, were formative. I was like “the Ramones are interesting, the Sex Pistols, whatever.” But for me, it was the Hellcows. The way that people receive mass media depends on their location. When you see mass media and you don't know anyone who writes for television or acts on television, it becomes a much more bizarre product, and you have an inherent suspicion about it. In a sense, Portland is a model city, a tiny model of a city. It feels like this petite version of a fully-grown kind of place. It has all the various parts but in miniaturized form, and it becomes easier to see how the parts interact because there's only one of each part.
TPI : You situate Trixie and Tina on this permanent Portland frontier at the edge of Forest Park, where they're starting their own little age of discovery, riding the bus and doing drugs.
JR : And thrift shopping. It is an age of discovery, that mid-teenage moment when you're really finding a lot of things out for the first time. For me, a big theme of the whole book is friendship and the way we build ourselves through our friendships and swap pieces of ourselves with other people. A lot of that comes out in the collaborative process, and that's why I gave Trixie and Tina the whole filmmaking project to do. It was a way for me to bring these characters into an extreme kind of intimacy, where their actual imaginations are feeding off of each other. I went into this thing believing there was a dearth of real literary friendship narratives, although I've since come to realize there's a real bedrock. The Epic of Gilgamesh, that's as old as it gets in terms of friendship narratives. It's about the tragedy of losing a friend. Teenagers have a moment where friendships can become incredibly intense. I wanted to put their friendship through the whole motion of that kind of amazing blossoming early moment to a more subtle power dynamic to it ultimately breaking, and there being a kind of sense of betrayal and loss at the end.
TPI : In the book's dedication, you call Portland “the most glamorous town in the world.”
JR : I do find it very glamorous. I think everybody feels this way, or they feel the opposite. You either love where you come from and find this enormous charisma in it that only a few people understand, or you just despise it and you're so glad that you got out of that hellhole. You take a certain amount of the place's self-mythologizing at face value, but I do feel like Portland continues to be this weird kind of magnet. Per capita there seems to be more interesting and eccentric activity going on there than in other places. But again, most people would say the same thing. It's like, if you're from Kentucky, then the pot from Kentucky is stronger than anywhere else, the teenagers from Kentucky are the most … corrupt and evil or something. To me, that's the ultimate paradox of regional identity. Everyone feels that where they're from is the center of the world.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
