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IN CONVERSATION
Ethan Canin
Author, Carry Me Across the Water
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Director, Commonwealth Club Book Awards
Barbara Lane: You went to Iowa for the Writer's Workshop before you went to medical school. Why did you make that change?
Ethan Canin: I wanted to be a writer. Starting out at college, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I thought that was the height of human thinking—how fast the ball rolls at the bottom of the ramp. I remember thinking that anyone who did the arts was only interested in them because he or she couldn't do the sciences, which were a superior form of thinking. The arts are sort of fuzzy. My junior year I took an English course. I made a joke that it was because it was in the course catalog on the page after engineering. And for whatever reason, The Stories of John Cheever fell into my lap.
Why does anybody write? I think I write because as Saul Bellow once said, "I'm a reader moved to emulation." It's as though you hear someone sing and you want to sing, like a mockingbird. I read this book of Cheever's and suddenly this world opened up to me and all I wanted to do was write. The unknowable interested me, not the knowable—the knowable being how fast the ball rolls at the bottom of the ramp, which tells you how far I got in mechanical engineering. It was a romantic rather than a practical decision to try to be a writer; I was a little young. I went to the University of Iowa and I didn't understand what a privilege it was to have two years to write, so I didn't take advantage of that time. I wrote a couple of stories in two years—a pretty poor output—so I left there with my tail between my legs. I got $1,250 for one of the stories, which was nice but hardly enough to live on even then.
I was a smart, Jewish kid, so I didn't want to be a lawyer. I like people, I'm social half the time and medicine interested me, but I realize now it was a failure of imagination to do that. I literally could not think of anything else. But things work out; I got lucky. In medicine you have the privilege of being tremendously exposed to the way that most of the world lives, at least I did during my residency at a big city hospital like San Francisco General. You see what prostitutes' lives are like, the homeless guys and all kinds of other people who tell you their secrets. They'll tell you things they don't tell anybody else and allow you to touch them on the first meeting. I can see why there have been a number of doctors who have also been interested in writing. It's the same interest in people and hearing other people's stories.
BL: You said that the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop was more competitive than medical school?
EC: There's no comparison. You know the old joke: What do they call the guy who graduates last in his class from Harvard Medical School? He's still a doctor, right?
BL:But it was really cutthroat there. Was there a lot of professional envy?
EC: Less so now, I think. Interestingly enough, I am the teacher now, so everybody seems to get along wonderfully from my vantage. And they're all so kind! But also I think there's a change in the character of the people who come there now. It was terribly competitive because it was terribly unknown and we all felt that no one was going to make it and what good is that kind of degree to you? I didn't learn a thing when I was a student there.
BL: Are your students learning something?
EC: Yes, I think they are. But I also say I wouldn't be a writer if I hadn't gone there. Two years in a sweet, small Midwestern town where writers are heroes - there's no other place like it. I was in a city of 60,000 people and I would guess there are three or four thousand people who are writing seriously. It's a place where people understand. You need that sense of a group, of a community where other people are doing, caring about this thing. Despite television, dot-coms and all the money that's just around the corner, there's still this small group of people who really care about literary language and would give up anything to do it.
BL: You left medicine in 1995.
EC: After The Palace Thief had been published. I left in a panic and in order to replicate the regimented life of a doctor, I started an office of writers, called The Writer's Grotto, and wrote that book on a time clock.
BL: Wasn't Po Bronson part of that?
EC: Po and I and a guy named Ethan Watters started it, and it's a tremendous success; it's an office for writers and artists. Obviously, it's low rent. It's nice to put on clothes, get out of the house and move downtown with the rest of humanity. It's really wonderful for writers. For the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa we're putting in offices for the students which they will lose if they don't use them four hours a day.
BL: So at that point, you weren't certain that this would be a viable choice? You said you were scared to death.
EC: I'm still not certain it's a viable choice. I think all writers and artists feel that. Where is the next thing going to come from? With inventions there is barrenness and then an eruption and you never know what's erupting. Sometimes it's good; sometimes it's not.
BL: Why haven't you used San Francisco in your novels?
EC: I don't like to write autobiographically. Carry Me Across the Water is set in five places: Boston, Pittsburgh, The Rockway Peninsula in Queens, Japan, and Hamburg, Germany.
BL:But there are tiny autobiographical elements: There's a father who's musical, and your father was concertmaster at the San Francisco Symphony. Your wife converted to Judaism, and there's a convert in the book. So there are snippets.
EC: Yes. How can you get away from it? There's no such thing as invention. My brother will occasionally read my books and say, "I remember that"—something I thought I had made up.
BL: Tell us about August Kleinman, the main character in Carry Me Across the Water. How did you set up the novel?
EC: There are lots of ways to write books, and I've tried different ones. I've never tried planning one out; I don't think that would ever work. I've tried writing from first to last page, sticking with it no matter how uninspired I've felt. I've tried writing only when inspired, no matter what about. Carry Me Across the Water was an easier book to write than others because it came to me as a voice. When that happens, you really have to sit down and type out the book because it's so rare; it's the thing a writer looks for—that manic, crazy, invention.
Bellow was a great influence when I was starting out as a writer, especially some of his early work. I suggest all writers read Dangling Man, which is a widely unread book, and then either Augie March or Henderson the Rain King, to see an explosive development of his writing. Dangling Man is a constricted young man's book, carefully written with not much sign of anything. I think he then underwent psychoanalysis and produced this volcanic outpouring of language and philosophy.
BL: Kleinman is looking back on his life when we meet him in the novel.
EC: There are four or five plots. The book starts out with him as a young man in Hamburg, Germany fleeing the Nazis right before the onset of the Second World War. He comes to this country, becoming an American really, living through some of the big events of the 20th century. He fights in the American army in the Pacific and gets rich and powerful, has a family, has everything, yet strangely, in old age, he does a reverse of what most people do: He becomes more porous and suddenly begins to accept an element of mysticism in his life. He spends his later days trying to make some kind of half recompense for things he'd done in his life. When I started out, I didn't know what I was writing, but after a while I had an inkling, and it became in my mind a man looking back on the five or six moments of violence in his life. That was the organizing principle for me as I wrote it.
BL: In Kleinman you have a character who has escaped from Nazi Germany and is at a great distance from his Judaism. Why did you want to explore that through his character?
EC: To say "want" is a misnomer. I didn't want to explore anything. A book discovers you. I wrote this book at a time when everybody was grabbing for money in the Bay Area and things were going crazy. Kleinman is a guy who makes a lot of money and in some funny way I think that informed this book; it was my little statement that there are other things in life besides that, and that your time is more valuable than your money. That's what this guy finds in the end.
BL: You deal with Judaism not only through August but through his son who is part of a "renewal" movement and whose wife has converted. What is your own relationship to Judaism?
EC: I'm very culturally strong. I feel more like a Jew than like an American. And yet, I am an atheist. My parents are both New Yorkers but I was never there until my late twenties. I grew up in small towns in the Midwest and then moved to San Francisco. I was always a Jew living in a non-Jewish place and never understood I felt like an outsider until my late twenties. The first time I got off the bus at Grand Central, I felt that I had come home, that I was among my own people. The feeling you get in New York is Jewishness to me; it's not a religious thing, it's an expressive thing. I love that learnedness is such a virtue in Judaism. I don't know many other religions that stress that.
BL: I read somewhere that you have a Woody Allenish sense of impending disaster. Is that culturally Jewish?
EC: Yes, that's what Judaism is. But I'm really proud of the religion, I'm proud of the secular aspect of Judaism: that being a man is not being a tough guy, but a gentle, intelligent, strong person. And I don't mean this facetiously, but I really don't know whether Jews believe in God. That's the Judaism I grew up with. I know there is a God that gets expressed in services, but for the Jews I know, it's not that. It's a cultural thing: a sense of being an outsider, a sense of learning being important, of music and the arts being important.
BL: Your book also demonstrates another theme: the father-son relationship. There's so much complexity; things left unsaid fester between August and his youngest son, Jimmy. Talk about your exploration of that dynamic; you might not have intended to write about it but you did.
EC: This is in some ways a book about fathers and sons and a lot of what I've written has been about that. I don't know why that is. I am a father now and I am a son and I have a father. All you can do in fiction is try to tell a story and make a character; if the character is real enough you can look into the corners of that person, into the hidden parts, and see something that is psychologically realistic or informative. If I intended to make a statement about what fatherhood or sonhood is like, I would fall flat and the reader would sense that. All you can do is make the statue and if it's lifelike enough certain readers will look at it from the front, certain readers will peek around and see something underneath it, and will see the shoulders, the interior aspects of it. Is this a book about fathers and sons? It is if you think about fathers and sons.
BL: Your books are very much about character and the choices that they make or confront in their lives, especially in For Kings and Planets. You have two spectacularly different characters; did you really know anyone as honorable as Orno Tarcher?
EC: No. People tend to identify their protagonists or the main character with the writer and I actually feel much more like the other guy, Marshall. For me, Orno, the good-hearted, sincere one, was an invention. It was like writing about a tree that eventually split and they just moved further apart. It was a discovery as I went along. I had no intention of writing like that. Maybe in some ways, I am as moral as Orno. You could go either way; that's the range of being human. I love the quote—actually the misquote of Goethe—which I still use as an epigram or epigraph on a previous book: "I have never heard of a crime that I could not imagine committing myself."
BL: In Carry Me Across the Water there is a very realistic and gripping scene concerning August's time on a reconnaissance mission in a cave in Japan. How did you research this chilling and brutal experience of World War II?
EC: It stems autobiographically from a time I went into an Indian cave in high school. I remember it was so narrow you either had to put your hands in front or behind you. I'd never been so frightened in all my life. What's interesting about the research is that the feeling is the same, it's inventive. I looked at an atlas and read some interesting diaries on the Web by World War II soldiers who had written up their own memories. Studs Terkel's The Good War is a fascinating oral history of Second World War soldiers. It has that authenticity a fiction writer always strives for. It's interesting in language that within about seven or eight words, you can tell whether something is fiction or nonfiction. What is that little meter we have? Fiction writers are envious in a way of that little something that happens when a reader reads nonfiction, the sense that this is true. The war stories I read are true so they have that glittering quality that fiction always strives for; sometimes fiction gets weighed down by a writer's attempt to make it beautiful, to make the language part of the art, which in the end can actually detract from it. I strive for stories like those in Terkel's book; they are poetic because of the power of the moment that's being described.
BL: Far from the Web contributing to the death of literary fiction, you used this tool to access tremendously valuable stories.
EC: At the University of Iowa, I've noticed in the last three or four years that the novels and stories people are writing are getting much bigger in the sense that they span continents and decades; they take place in village huts in Borneo. I don't know if that's a zeitgeist change or whether it is due to the Web.
BL: Do you try to avoid being influenced by the other writers you are reading?
EC: I read other writers in order to get started, in order to get an idea, because it is the only reliably reproducible source of inspiration there is. You read a good book and you're in that world; the sense that it has a physical substance and that the writer made you feel this or that, encourages you to think I can make someone feel that. As you get older you develop your own voice; it's an amalgam of what you've read, what you've heard, what you speak, what your relatives say. I read a few thousand stories a year, written by students and applicants and people vying for prizes, but, and the funny thing is, no two of them are even close to one another. What is voice in a piece of fiction? It's a combination of words and intelligence; not in the sense of smarts but in a take on the world. It's irreproducible and the comforting thing for writers to realize is that it's inimitable. You do have your own voice. You could try to imitate Hemingway, but it wouldn't be Hemingway exactly.
BL: Chekhov, another doctor/writer, wrote about aspiring to the objectivity of a chemist in writing. Is this something you find yourself striving for?
EC:Not at all. I wouldn't want to write like that. It implies a controlled view of art, of trying to make something the way a chemist might try to make a hexane ring. Writing a book like this is like reaching into your unconscious with a big furry prod, unable to touch exactly what you want to touch but having an idea of where it is. What comes out is unexpected; there's usually a moment in writing when something takes flight and you understand there's some heartbeat behind it. That's an unconscious thing.
BL: You have said on many occasions that "writing is agony," that you hate to write. I can see the prodding process being somewhat difficult, but ultimately the rewards reach far beyond the agony.
EC: The prodding process is not unpleasant. That's the pleasant part. It's the starting that's so difficult. Self-doubt is an ever present and looming ghost.
BL: Anne Lamott writes extensively about that.
EC: Her job in the culture is to express what nobody else does. Yes, everybody feels that. The people who say to me, "I love to write, I can't write enough," I usually don't want to read.
BL: Not enough suffering?
EC: Yes, not enough sense of the difficulty of it. And it is so exquisitely difficult; I find it harder than medicine ever was.
BL: Back to the new novel: Despite the trials and tribulations of Kleinman, the main character, there's a beautiful love story between him and his wife. I found it curious that you could create this character who was distant, arrogant and who could kill, but at the same time had this amazingly sweet love for his wife.
EC: He's in a situation where anyone would kill: It's wartime. Writing about love is very difficult. There are very few ways to express it, other than, "I love you." It's very difficult to express the attraction in English prose. I heard a cinematographer say that people in his field rate each other on the scene of the airplane landing, which you see in every movie; they always try to find some new take on that. In some ways writing romance is that same bugaboo for writers. It's difficult to do without being soppy.
BL: Anne Lamott also talks about the politics of envy among writers. Michael Chabon is your friend, and has just won the Pulitzer and the Commonwealth Club gold medal—which you have won in the past—are you filled with ecstatic glee for him?
EC: It isn't exactly ecstatic glee. You have to learn a lot of things to be a writer: First is the prose style; second is how to get up after you've been knocked down; third is how to keep inventing things. Maybe the fourth is how to deal with envy. That's true for any profession. The only way I've learned to do it—and it's enormously freeing—is to really be devoted to writing. It sounds a little too good to be true but it works: to be moved by something that's well done.
BL: Your first collection, Emperor of the Air, deals with family and betrayal. Did you set out with these themes at the heart of the stories or did they gel over time?
EC: I never set out to write anything. It literally is setting out to survive the swim in frozen and frothing seas. The Palace Thief is more vivid in my memory: I remember starting some of those stories with exercises in mind, something Anne Lamott talks about. My task that day was to write a story in which a pair of socks takes on emotional importance. That was the airplane-landing scene; I wanted to see if I could pull it off, see if I could make somebody care about a pair of socks. And that's how that story started. I wrote a lot of the stories in Emperor of the Air when I was in medical school, because I wasn't supposed to be writing. It was a little rebellion.
BL: And when you were in the Writer's Workshop you weren't writing because you were supposed to.
EC: Because it wasn't a rebellion then.
BL: You wrote a short story for The New Yorker which took place in a restaurant that Nixon had visited. Was that written recently?
EC: I wrote it as a novella to go with another novella, Carry Me Across the Water—two novellas to make a book. The one that appeared in The New Yorker, "Vins Fins," was originally about 40,000 words. It had to be cut down to 9,000 words so that it would fit in an issue. It's about a kid who joins the Weather Underground, a little past his prime. The Weather Underground doesn't even appear in that story; it might be in the next book I write about where a kid finds himself swept up in the politics of the early '70s, so I can get Nixon in there too. It's past the heyday of the Weather Underground, but it's a subject that interested me and I still might go back and write that book. But there's something about having edited it with The New Yorker that has killed it somewhat in my mind. Invention goes through phases—flowering, dormancy—and having a book out and talking about it. God forbid that you talk about anything that you haven't written yet. I know I'm dealing a deathblow to that story by even mentioning it.
BL: How useful or necessary do you consider vocational training to be for writers?
EC: There's a lot of feeling against these training programs. Sometimes people are envious because they didn't get in, and for a long time I defended them. But the University of Iowa is a wonderful place to go for a couple of years, though it has come to my attention recently that there might be something a little narrowing about it. It might knock off some of the edges of invention that you ordinarily wouldn't see. Yet the talent that comes through there is extraordinary and inspires me all the time.
BL: When a book goes to press are you ever haunted by unresolved scenes or issues?
EC: It's like cutting through a dense jungle with a sharp pencil. Writing a book is such a blind act, like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can go the whole way. You are pushing through something, you don't even understand what's in front of you, what's behind you. The most difficult thing about writing is that you don't know what you've made; you are relying on other readers to tell you. My wife and editor insisted that I take out a scene in Carry Me Across the Water, yet I gave it to another person who thought it was the best scene in the whole book. And it killed me; I wanted to keep the scene but bowed to the pressure because I didn't know what I'd done.
BL: Can you briefly describe what the scene is?
EC: A thug confronts Kleinman, who tries to take his business from him. The thug reappears at the end of the book as a salesman from Microsoft. That was my social joke; I think that's why my wife wanted it out.
