TW Interview by David Cameron
On Busy Monsters—Novels or Kids—and Finding a Place to Write
My interview with author William Giraldi this March got off to a funny start.
We sat down in the lobby of 236 Bay State Road at Boston University, home to the creative writing department and the very place where Robert Lowell once taught Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In the iconic lobby, heating pipes clanked; poets recited below us at a reading in the offices of AGNI, the storied BU literary journal where Giraldi is fiction editor.
“I might need to cut this short,” he said. “My wife is going into labor any second now.”
Fortunately, the subsequent ninety minutes went off without a hitch, and the very next day Giraldi and family welcomed baby number two. (On behalf of the entire Talking Writing staff, congratulations to Mom, Dad, and big brother.)
Despite such distractions, our conversation ranged wide and deep, covering his quest for the perfect place to write; favorite writers; and the publication of his first novel, Busy Monsters (Norton, 2011), which has drawn praise from luminaries like Harold Bloom.
In addition to overseeing the fiction at AGNI—in whose editorial offices we were supposed to meet until we were booted by the poets—William Giraldi is a BU lecturer, teaching literature and literary criticism to undergraduates. He’s also distinguished himself as a literary critic and short story writer.
Reading Busy Monsters is like crashing a party where Cervantes, Hopkins, Wordsworth, and Homer all compete at drinking games. The novel is an inebriated joyride of language, one that includes Bigfoot, UFO devotees, body builders, ghost hunters, and Yale-educated, identical-twin sex pedagogues. Harold Bloom can groove on the flagrant literary allusions; Joe Bagofdonuts can just go along for the romp. (My favorite character, incidentally, is named Romp.)
Beware: This novel is not for the politically correct faint of heart. If you have a sacred cow, chances are nine out of ten that Busy Monsters will jab it (especially if you’re a white male writer—he pulls no punches there). But as Giraldi explained to me:
“If you’re a novelist and you’re not offending someone, you’re not doing your job. I can’t emphasize that enough.
TW: How’s the book doing?
WG: I’m so divorced from it emotionally right now. I told Norton I’m not interested in getting the numbers. I don’t know why I don’t care about that. A lot of it might be self-preservation. By the time a book gets out there, you’ve already moved on to something else.
It wasn’t a life-changing event for me. When the book came in the mail, I looked at it to make sure my name was spelled right. Then I just put it down on the couch and changed a diaper. I’d been writing for fifteen years. I’m 36, and I think if Busy Monsters had happened to me when I was 26, it would have been life changing.
TW: Tell me about your writing habits.
WG: As I was completing Busy Monsters, I had real trouble writing at my desk, and it wasn’t just because my son was hurricaning through the house. My desk was uncomfortable. The computer didn’t feel right under my fingers. I went from an old Toshiba laptop to a giant iMac on which I finished Busy Monsters.
So then Busy Monsters comes out. I try to go back to writing at that desk, and I just can’t do it. This is at home. I have this book-gorged office/library at the front of our condo. There are maybe 2,000 books in this room—it’s bulletproofed by books—I like that, feeling bulletproofed inside this bunker of books.
I had an essay to write for the magazine Orion about Wordsworth’s spiritual connection to nature. But the essay was awful. I couldn’t write it at my desk. I fought it the whole way. So BU got me an office in the library. I took the Toshiba laptop into that office. I began working again on the essay. I wrote the first three pages—then I couldn’t write another word. I went there every day, and I sat there and looked out the window, and the room felt cramped and crowded. This had never happened to me before.
I was exhausted by all the PR I had to do for the book, and the language in Busy Monsters is so over the top that I literally felt post-orgasmic. I’d just been spent. Linguistically. Nothing worked.
Then BU got me a Macbook. A nice little titanium Macbook. I had it next to my bed, and I woke up one morning, and I had all these ideas for an essay that I was planning on doing at the library, and I opened the Macbook and finished the whole essay in bed that day. I stayed in bed for about ten hours. That’s how I’ve been writing ever since.
TW: What’s your analysis of this? Did the ghost of Steve Jobs come to your rescue?
WG: The Macbook just felt so nice in my hands. It flipped a switch. I no longer felt depleted. Now I sit up in bed with my legs crossed, I have the window cracked open just a little bit so I can see outside, and I’ve got a phalanx of books on my nightstand on the left. I can’t write unless I’m somehow buffeted by books. I secretly wish that whatever is in their pages will, by some magic, go from there into my cranium.
TW: How much of this do you think is particular just to you or is universal—that is, the importance of place and the tactile experience of writing?
WG: I’m baffled by how Tolstoy and Hardy wrote in longhand. For me, the act of creating words is a tactile act of click click click. Without it, the words don’t come. My handwritten letters can be written by a grade-schooler. The physical act of writing for me means fingers clicking. Not a hand scrawling. I don’t even see how words are possible with a hand scrawling.
Place, environment, feeling connected to a particular project, has got to be important. Even your view. That’s why I open the window a little bit, for the experience of being connected to the world. That’s why I enjoy being distracted a little bit. Mid-sentence, I’ll get up and walk into the other room; then I’ll come back and finish the sentence.
The writing process for me is not some mystical, holy endeavor—it is quite practical and tactile. I’m never looking for inspiration or the muses to kiss me or the stars to align. All I’m looking for is the right pillow to put behind my back and for the window to be open just the right amount.
TW: You’ve written short fiction; you’ve written a novel. How do you approach one versus the other?
WG: They’re different animals. They require a different mentation, a different level of stamina. They also require a different vision. It’s a novel’s mission to tackle God and society. The novels that are most important to me are in some ways both religious and social, by which I mean they’re not simply domestic.
I think a story has a hard time tackling God and society. The American short story’s classic territory is the family, snapshots from domestic realities: a husband and wife, a father and daughter, two friends. Short stories happen on special days. A novel happens during a special lifetime. Novels and short stories simply aren’t aiming for the same targets.
So it’s not just a matter of length, but of intent and of what the objective of the vision should be. What forces in our lives are more important than the religious and the social? By “religious,” I mean the mythological or spiritual, not the doctrinal or dogmatic. In Busy Monsters, whenever I use “god,” I use it lowercased. For us, now, I don’t see how one can speak of God capital-G. One can speak of Literature capital-L or Poetry capital-P—but only as a replacement for God capital-G.
TW: In your book, religion is both under the surface and out in the open.
WG: Subtextually and metatextually.
TW: You’re the professor!
WG: What I mean is that Busy Monsters is a story about storytelling in which the artifice of storytelling is the subject of the story. You never quite know what is meta and what is actual.
TW: As a reader, I have to say, that was actually a lot of fun.
WG: I’m glad you used the word “fun.” Busy Monsters was actually a lot of fun to write. I don’t like writing at all. It’s arduous and time-consuming and lonely. I’d much rather read than write. Busy Monsters was the first time in my life when I didn’t much care about readership or criticism. I was just going to let myself be outrageous and Dionysian—I wanted to have a spiritual experience, an ecstatic one.
TW: In anything that’s been written about this book, all roads lead to its central characteristic: language. I gave up looking up every word I didn’t know.
WG: Charlie [Busy Monster’s narrator] doesn’t know what a lot of those words mean, either!
TW: The book is also a completely different experience reading aloud. There’s so much sound, especially when Charlie goes on one of his riffs.
WG: Well, I’ll tell you where I got that. One of the best academic experiences of my life was when I spent a year in graduate school studying Gerard Manley Hopkins with Geoffrey Hill. Hopkins composed all his verse for recitation, and his verse, which is called “sprung rhythm,” is very melodic. I wanted somehow to try to be in at least the same stadium with the exuberance of Father Hopkins’s language, that kind of linguistic inebriation.
Some of the words that Charlie uses are invented and sometimes even not right, and yet he just loves the sound of words and does it consciously. Even as he suffers, one senses that he’s having fun with his language. For him, language is the only way he knows how to be, his only view unto the world. He can’t even see his life or the world without seeing it through Homer or Milton or Dante. Nothing he sees or does reaches him without this filter. The book is about language.
TW: Milan Kundera delineates the two avenues in literature: Clarissa and Tristram Shandy. The Western European novel went the Clarissa route, which he bemoans. Busy Monsters is clearly more Tristram Shandy than Clarissa.
WG: Yes, absolutely. Kundera is a real master of criticism. I would choose Tristram Shandy over Clarissa any day. Why? Because Sterne is a better storyteller or writer. His facility for language is greater. Serious readers open a book for myriad reasons, only one of which is the story. We also read a book for its intelligence, language, communion with the world, emotional release, Aristotelian catharsis.
TW: You did say once, and I quote, “Human communion is the business of every storyteller.”
WG: Does Charlie say that?
TW: No, you say that. In an interview I came across in The Rumpus.
WG: “Human communion”? I said that? Yeah, I would agree. Sure. That’s well put. Quite the lettered lad who said that!
Clarissa is such an onerous quotidian exploration of a pretty commonplace psyche and the social milieu in which that psyche apprehends itself. But in some ways, Clarissa was a necessary prerequisite for the modern European novel.
A novel like Don Quixote really does everything. It’s absurd and realist; philosophical and pragmatic; it’s a tragedy and a comedy. The language is beautiful, and the story is like no other.
TW: Can emphasis on language be at the expense of emotional engagement?
WG: If you do it wrong, yes. If it’s all concept and no character. In some ways, Charlie and Gillian [Charlie’s paramour] are the only real characters in the book. I just did a reading and spent a day at Drew University. I visited a class that had read the book. One woman in the class said, “It’s easy for a black person to be offended by Romp.”
I would hope that every writer is offended by Charlie. Every bride-to-be should be offended by Gillian. If you’re a novelist and you’re not offending someone, you’re not doing your job. I can’t emphasize that enough. All the important intellectual terrain is politically and philosophically and morally difficult.
TW: Who are those writers you can’t live without?
WG: The books I reach for most are poetry and epics. I couldn’t do without The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid—or Shelly, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.
Donne and Hopkins have meant more to me than James and Melville. Is that unusual for a novelist? Maybe, but I don’t know any other way to be in the world. So, my short list never really changes. It’s always Homer and Donne and Hopkins and Wordsworth. I’m a real Anglophile. I don’t know why the English in the nineteenth century have had such an effect on me.
As far as fiction goes, the novels of Hardy—and I love Kingsley Amis and his son, Martin. My favorite novelist is Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Dickens. He is the greatest storyteller I know in The Moonstone and The Woman in White. There’s not a dull paragraph in either of them. My recommendation for any budding novelist is to go to Wilkie Collins, because he will teach you about storytelling.
The other stories I can’t do without are the Sherlock Holmes stories. They’re so entertaining and so smart and so well written, and there’s never a costive moment. You can’t go wrong with Collins and Conan Doyle, because the English is so pristine and the storytelling so stellar.
TW: I did not expect you to say this.
WG: What did you think I was going to say? Faulkner? Hawthorne? [He pronounces both names with dramatic affectation.] We forget that literature can be fun. Literature can be enjoyable while also being brilliant.
Many people think that if you want to write “serious” literature, then you need to be obscure and dense and relentlessly psychological, with a minimum of storytelling. But that’s crap. You don’t need to be dull in order to be smart or “literary.”
“Whisper this (slowly, in earnest): Why do we do the things we do? How can we make sense of our lives in the belly of this madness? Do we suffer so much for wealth and renown, for the love of a boy or a girl or God? All this emptiness, within and without, and we here with a shovel between two nothings, trying to fill, and fill. Our silent Savior’s broken body: in that believe? How? Which way? Is it each way? But we can’t hold it. So in the lifetime of our discontent we worship one another and then wither when left. The paralytic on the corner will tell you: he longs for his legs. He used to feel such comfort when he shouted insults at the Lord, and the Lord, as patient as the grave (is the grave), said back: Oh child, you just don’t understand. Meaning he one day might. Which he won’t.
—from Busy Monsters by William Giraldi
